As last year, the Solar Go Cart team at Imagine Prep was very successful. The team, led by Mr. Lancaster and Mr. Polk, had around 10 students on it.

“The club is oriented around teamwork and learning. Since we are building a solar powered cart, it was a learning experience for everyone even if they had been on the team before,” Sophomore Aubrey Nelson explained. “Since we built the cart from the ground up, we had to communicate a lot too, which made us learn how to work with everyone on the team.”

The team was composed mostly of sophomores, like Tristan Dowse, who described the club as an excellent way to be engaged in learning new things such as engineering.

Every student on the team had a specific role in the building process of the cart, which was made from scratch. From the electrical and schematic part to the welding part, everyone had to put efforts in their work.

However, there were some struggles along the way but the team work was effective and the problems were overcome.

“Our biggest success was the fact that we we able to come up with our own design,” Dowse said.

Mr. Lancaster added that the best success for him was having built the cart from nothing.

The race took place in Tucson on May 5. All the students from the different schools and districts met at raceway at 9:00 a.m. to begin checking in, going through each part of the cart to be scored and to make sure the kart was eligible to race. The actual race started at 1:00 p.m. and raced for 20 minutes and they were scored on how many laps they could achieve and on the speed their cart could reach.

The race, for our school team, didn’t exactly go as planned. The cart made three fourth of a lap and it then started to slow down until another cart bumped into it. At that point Dowse, who was the driver, decided to break and ask for help.

However, the kids were happy to have competed in the race.

“Personally, no matter how we did during the race I think we succeeded,” Nelson said.

Afterwards, at the end of the race, all the teams had gathered to present awards.

“Our expectations for next year are to make sure that the cart is lighter, making it out of aluminium instead of metal and hopefully to win the race or make a good position,” Lancaster said.

If you are interested in building a cart and having some fun, join the team next year!