Getting back into the swing of things after our victory at Texas Motor Speedway, and connecting with our communities, we are excited to now start working on campus and bring aboard new members! After a year of remote learning, students are hungry to gain more knowledge and experience in STEM and Green Energy. The club has had an extreme amount of interest among students since they have the opportunity to focus on designing, building, and testing a solar car!
To bring up new members to speed, we want everyone to learn about all aspects and skills of the car. This will benefit them to accumulate foundational skills to apply to real projects on the car.
We kicked off the year with a 2-week course of Wednesday workshops about ‘How to Fundraise.’ These Wednesday Workshops were taught after school by Maya Peña where she discussed the importance of fundraising. New members learned how to reach out to local businesses, family, and friends to learn how to fundraise for our club! She additionally walked through how to address a professional email, how to promote our club, and how to manage the donation process. Maya’s outreach templates prepared all members for what to say to a new corporation, a personal, or returning sponsor! This was important to our team because it was a stepping stone for new members who have never created a formal letter asking for donations to support our team.
Our 6-week course of Weekly Teachings is for new members to engage with every aspect and sub team. For example CAD (Computer-Aided Design), how to create a blog post, Shop Safety, Arduino projects, Eagle CAD (Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor) for creating schematics, learning how solder for electrical, and Strategy to learn the fundamental basics of coding! Each workshop is led by a core member who has experience in the specific topic and new members are distributed into different groups each week to have a basic foundation of the teaching of each topic of all subteams. These teachings help the new members gauge in the specific subteam their interest in and also support new members who haven’t had this type of experience yet and so learn more.
Oncoming members are helping with the construction of a table.
Over the course of these weeks of these teachings Kaley Hoang (10) a new member expresses her reason for joining Green Energy and how the Weekly Teachings have benefitted her, “I joined Green Energy because I’ve been interested in engineering and the environment, and wanted to get a hands-on experience. I also thought it was really cool how they won the solar car challenge that they competed in, and I wanted to be a part of that. The weekly teachings have taught me a lot about certain skills that I will use for the team as well as introduced me to skills I use in the future. It also helped me get a better understanding of what subgroup I would want to be in.” The teachings Kaley has completed include electrical schematics using an application called Eagle CAD with the lead Abigail Jawili [10], the fundamental basics of programming for Strategy with Timothy Jou [10],and learning how to solder cells and understanding how string cells and bypass diodes work for with Thomas Kebede [12].
As a core member who has been conducting these teachings to new members, Zach Olsson [10] gives some insight into his teachings of CAD, “In the first few weeks of onboarding, it has been very interesting and encouraging to see new and existing members come together to create an environment where learning goes both ways for everyone and progress is shared and celebrated. For me, teaching others has been really helpful not only for the people I am working with but myself as well in learning things about myself and things I didn’t know I was capable of. Being able to share the knowledge that you have gained is one of the most rewarding things when helping others and there is nothing more exciting than seeing others succeed and progress because of it.”
Hailin Truman (11) is being shadowed by new members of his CAD project.
We are very excited to progress throughout this year’s school year, and cannot wait to show off our progress through our future projects of the car and our team. If you want to stay up to date with the progression of our team, you can follow our Instagram, Twitter, or come back for more bi-weekly blog posts here on our website! We thank you and are immensely thankful for your support.