Figured I would pipe in, Leamington is my home town, but didn't go to Cardinal Carter.....

Have you guys every thought of hitching up with a more local University and getting involved in their build? Im not sure if your allowed to live in your team room all night and through weekends. That alone would make it a challenge.

The last thing a university team would want is a bunch of highschool kids kicking around taking up space, so we never bothered with that, but we did have a lot of contact with the U of T team they where a great help in getting us going. Now that CSE has been declined by SAE International they are still continuing the building process but are focusing on different topics, such as a dragster and a highschool SAE competition.

Too bad you were declined by SAE, but glad you went onto Univ. and working on at least some sort of SAE project.

Going back to a comment earlier, there are many high schools and colleges that have the equipment to build a university killer. I am in that position now... I postponed University to go back and do a engineering technology program. My classmates have approached me and asked if I can help re-organize the FSAE team with the goal of running a car in about 2 years and compete after testing for a year. We've got a huge manual machine shop with a few CNCs and a rapid-prototyper. Time to work on a corporate entity and find some sponsors...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Andy K,

my ex gf went to Cardinal carter.. and buncha other friends... Went to CCH myself..

goto the University of windsor now..


Eff ya.

G'day guys, I'm a high school teacher from Perth on the west coast of Australia. I've been involved in a local competition like Electrathon here for the last 7 years and have always wanted to build a FSAE beast with my students. We've visited UWA and their FSAE team before and it just gets the kids so fired up!

I think that a few people's opinions about not wanting HS kids at the FSAE comp show a bit of arrogance and that they are scared of being beaten by a bunch of schoolkids. I'd love to do it for FSAE-A. The reality is that you could build something not much more complex than a superkart with a 450cc-600cc engine and so long as it was reliable you had every chance of getting a top 20 finish, provided you finished the endurance event. You wouldn't get traction control programs etc on a HS car but it could shake things up a little.

Also, the comments about "this is a student design program, not just building what my teacher/professor/lecturer drew up" - from my experience with the electric cars, students need to start somewhere. If they build what I was to design first, when they get to Uni they have an idea of what is needed and what works. It allows them to learn how to manufacture parts before they have to design them as well. Sure, the car may not qualify for prizes, but who cares?

I reckon it would be great.

quote:

Originally posted by wooly:
I think that a few people's opinions about not wanting HS kids at the FSAE comp show a bit of arrogance and that they are scared of being beaten by a bunch of schoolkids.

More like worried that a bunch of school kids will get themselves KILLED, since FSAE is an engineering competition and I doubt the engineering skills of HS kids is adequate given the performance potential under the current formula.

As I probably have posted here before, I work for a private 4-year college. Our students wanted to build a solar car for Sunrayce many moons ago, and made a deal with the local high school's shop teacher. We didn't have any type of manufacturing facilities whatsoever. They had a full machine shop. We wanted to build a solar-powered racecar. They didn't want to make any more of the same old candle holders and bookends as HS shop projects. Seems like a match made in heaven! We did the design work, and used them like a job-shop to make the parts.

Since we met with them regularly and they had the bigger picture of what was going on, they felt like they were part of the team. On our first closed-circuit testing day, more of the high school students showed up than our own students! Oh, and if that doesn't take the cake, we didn't have to pay a dime for materials or labor. The HS students held fundraisers that covered most of the construction costs, and found sponsorship on our behalf to cover the shortage.

If you want to be part of FSAE, may I suggest contacting some teams in your area and seeing if any of them would be open to a similar arrangement? Just because the rules say that HS teams can't enter, don't assume that you can't play a useful role on someone else's team.....

Ok, let me clear up the 'arrogance' comment. Possibly not the best word for it. Call it protective if you will. But regardless of what competition you are talking about, in any field of endeavor, some people prefer to keep the competition in-house as it were, and opening it up to new competitors can sometimes be a little, well, scary i guess.

The last thing that we as HS teachers would want if kids getting injured in a 60hp+ race car. The rules as they stand on drivers anyway would mean it would more likely be us teachers or ex-students who would drive the thing anyway so it could conceivably be me who gets killed if the car is no good!

However Vreihen, you raise a really good point, and something I will take up with one of our local universities...

Cheers!

The engineering it takes to build a racecar doesn't require a college degree. Most of what I've learned here outside of differential equations I could easily have done in high school with regular calc classes.

Sure, to get into the high-end optimizing you have to know more specifics, but most basic engineering doesn't go beyond Calc 2, especially with computers as well-used as they are now.

Wesley is quite right. It does not take a university or college education to build a competitive and safe race car. Now in my second year of an engineering program hasn't shed much more light on how to build a race car, when it comes down to it like wesley said computers will take care of the more complexed calculations (Not saying that you don't need to learn it cause you do) Just saying that it is pretty stupid to say that i am more qualified to build the car now then i was then. Looking back the only things i would change on the car are things we learned while testing that didn't work to well.

quote:

Originally posted by Wesley:
The engineering it takes to build a racecar doesn't require a college degree.

It doesn't take a degree to build it, but it does to design it well. How can you engineer a car without knowing the fundamentals (at least) of areas like strength of materials, statics, dynamics, kinematics, machine design, thermo, etc... Sure, most of the math is calc 2 or lower and computers make the job easier. But if you can't explain (or don't know) why a larger diameter tube is stronger in bending, how would you be qualified to design a chassis?

I'm not suggesting that HS kids don't have the capacity to learn this stuff, I'm just saying it takes more than math skills. And Sean, the further you get, the more useful the material is. Granted, there are very few things directly applicable, the main exception being machine design.

On a different note, we have had a few Highschoolers come out to our shop through some program, but it is a joke. Some rich kid (wealthy area HS) comes out once, never shows up again, then submits a report to his teacher about all the "work" he did.

Mike

Some HS kids are very able in all aspects of design and construction and are capable of qualifying with clarity the reasoning behind their design choices etc, technical knowledge and understanding is not the sole domain of university students. The secret within any good subject area is to instill the want/need to develop one's knowledge, age should not be a preventative factor. Reference to this can be viewed on the DP1 website, posting 17th February 08.

Ian Scott

It does not require a college degree to build, or for that matter design a racecar. I say that knowing that the dirt car I plan to drive at my local track in a few weeks was built by a man that I'm pretty sure can't spell college, much less has ever been to one.

It's not the degree that's important, but the schedule. In high school, I was taking, essentially, 35 credit hours, non-stop, every week. This semester, I'm taking 13. That's the big difference. There are other advantages time wise as well. If I fail class in college, it's almost expected. In high-school, I would have been beaten by my parents. Now I live on my own, and can make the decision to only sleep 3 or 4 hours because the frame had to get done. Can't do that as a high-school student. That's why HS FSAE isn't plausible.

Not to mention continuity as well, since most of the kids ended up joining the Cardinal Carter effort were senior year HS student, once they graduate they are out, so you spend 1-2 years top, hard to pass on the knowledge or lesson from year to year, as you would've have in say 4-5 years of university. Also the size of the team may change quite drastically from year to year as you may or maynot get enough dedicated people each year because of the coming and graduating of the students. I know at UofT or perhaps other Univeristies as well you can at least count on a core group of people through out a 4-5 year stint...

quote:

Now I live on my own, and can make the decision to only sleep 3 or 4 hours because the frame had to get done. Can't do that as a high-school student. That's why HS FSAE isn't plausible.

hey at least you got the 3 or 4 hours. And as long as i was quiet i could work in the garage all night in high school.

I agree with Mike and the others. High school students lack fundamentals and the much knowledge needed (to put it simply). By the way, I attended that HS and was actually one of the founders of that "race car" team back when I was in HS.
P.S. Our university team just finished at Michigan international. The results are up. What a competition.

quote:

Originally posted by FeX32:
I agree with Mike and the others. High school students lack fundamentals and the much knowledge needed (to put it simply).

I recently discovered that there are a group of high schools in Wisconsin that came up with an ingenious solution to many people's concerns here:

http://www.formulahighschool.com/

By cloning a standard Formula Vee and even publishing the parts list to go shopping, they have taken all of the engineering out of the equation.....

Interesting. It seems it has become more of a 'race' for them as opposed to an engineering competition for us.
Although, I see the potential benefits and positive outcomes.

Yes, very interesting solution. I think Formula Vee would be more appropriate, Formula SAE is honestly too much of an engineering competition; just wouldn't be a good fit for high school kids, no matter how smart. Even in a simple class like Formula Vee they should still have plenty of opportunities to go wild with innovation (and experience its benefits and penalties first hand).

In our high school's auto and engine class, all we did was rebuild a Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine. I wish we had something this cool. Not to mention, you get a few high school kids who have actually built a car before...perhaps it's time to start recruiting. I know ISU's tuition is fairly attractive compared to UW...

I still disagree that high school students lack the fundamentals to understand these things. They're just not that complicated.

If they have the drive that the college FSAE students do (and why wouldn't they, after all, where do the college students come from?) they'll read the same book that I did for my materials classes and learn the same things. There's nothing magical about college that allows you to learn the materials, and to say that high school students can't understand it is at the very least stupid.

I also think high school students have plenty of time. I managed a frame-off restoration in high school, I sure could have spent those 8 hours a day after school learning and building a race car if there was an outlet to do so.

I'm sticking with my guns on this one. I'm applying things I've learned in graduate level classes, and there are times I still feel I'm out-classed in FSAE. Look at the way many teams struggle with the help of their colleges, faculty advisers, or even just a bunch of old folks like me who played around in the real world a few years before coming to college. Look at the issues beyond building the car, like project management, team building, sponsorship, PR, etc; hell, it's a wonder college kids can even pull it off.

A few short years ago, all it took to get a top 10 finish in FSAE was a well-tuned, reliable vehicle that made it through endurance. We did just that in '06. But looking at how things went down at MIS last week, the competition is just getting too fierce to be a top finisher without applying the kind of engineering fundamentals that really smart high school kids don't find out until they become really smart college kids.

Imagine trying to understand Milliken or OptimumG without having taken at least a basic course in dynamics. Maybe if they spent a couple more years busting their butts in high school physics and calculus; at which point they would no longer be high school kids. Sure, high school kids could get a car built, and no doubt get it to pass tech., but they would have almost no chance at a top finish. Imagine talking to Claude in design back when you were 15. I almost wet myself when I was 27.

On the other hand, if they entered a simpler class like Formula Vee, they could get 90% of the experience, and have a really good shot at beating a lot of folks. They could apply all the rules of basic design, mechanics and fabrication without getting tangled in all the BS that goes along with an engineering competition, and have a lot of fun.

By eliminating all the higher level stuff involved with FSAE, more people would get involved. And I would try to get them all to come to ISU