On Monday the Indiana Mathematics Science and Technology Education Alliance (IMSTEA) made their yearly visit to O’Reilly Raceway Park with the running of the High Mileage Challenge. On the left is a shot of two Nationwide cars during the race in 2007 and on the right is one of the IMSTEA cars that were here. Just looking at the two you can tell it is something that is out of the norm for us. Seeing all the hard work these students put into their cars is truly amazing.
Also the competitors and their families are so nice and appreciative of what we do. I had four or five different parents and students stop me and say thanks for letting them hold the event at the facility.
President Jim Thompson took a few minutes out of his day to explain the event.
I was very curious with an event like this what is the biggest thing he hopes the students walk away with?
“I want the students to get the knowledge of how to weld together math science and technology and how to get something done. Also they learn how to get things done in their community because they have to go out and get sponsors and raise the money to build the cars. Those two things are the most critical.”
Some of the schools have been involved in this event for a handful of year and I also wanted to know how long it took to complete the cars?
“The schools that have done a previous event can get there cars done is a school year they usually start in September and get it ready to go here in April. First year schools actually won’t make it the first year because they will try to get their car together and won’t get it done but they will bring the kids out here and they will get motivated and then they will come back the next year and they will be able to come back year after year.
Jim has been involved with this event for a handful of years and has seen it grow and the cars change through the years.
“The development of the cars from the first year we had this we had a car made of 2x4s, needless to say it didn’t do very good on mileage. Now we have several carbon fiber cars and seeing that progression over the year is neat. We also started at 270mpg and last year we were at nearly 1200mpg and this is pretty neat.”
The last thing we talked about was if students had taken what they learned and have they applied it to their careers.
Also the competitors and their families are so nice and appreciative of what we do. I had four or five different parents and students stop me and say thanks for letting them hold the event at the facility.President Jim Thompson took a few minutes out of his day to explain the event.
I was very curious with an event like this what is the biggest thing he hopes the students walk away with?
“I want the students to get the knowledge of how to weld together math science and technology and how to get something done. Also they learn how to get things done in their community because they have to go out and get sponsors and raise the money to build the cars. Those two things are the most critical.”Some of the schools have been involved in this event for a handful of year and I also wanted to know how long it took to complete the cars?
“The schools that have done a previous event can get there cars done is a school year they usually start in September and get it ready to go here in April. First year schools actually won’t make it the first year because they will try to get their car together and won’t get it done but they will bring the kids out here and they will get motivated and then they will come back the next year and they will be able to come back year after year.
Jim has been involved with this event for a handful of years and has seen it grow and the cars change through the years.“The development of the cars from the first year we had this we had a car made of 2x4s, needless to say it didn’t do very good on mileage. Now we have several carbon fiber cars and seeing that progression over the year is neat. We also started at 270mpg and last year we were at nearly 1200mpg and this is pretty neat.”
The last thing we talked about was if students had taken what they learned and have they applied it to their careers.
“We have a few kids who go on into technology education they will say they learned how to do technology education by doing this. I have had a couple of kids who went into engineering schools and they say it was a big help because it helped me learn how to do something practical because you don’t need to know a lot of thermal dynamics to do this. It helped them to learn something practical.”
Winners were Greenfield Central High School in Stock in the car they created that got 1048.79 mpg.
Mater Dei High School won the Unlimited Class with a car that got 1293.09mpg. More photos can be found on our Flickr page
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