Outreach and Education Events

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This winter NUsolar will be hosting several outreach events in local Chicgo-area schools. Later this February we will be traveling to Orrington Elementary school to talk to give a hour-long presentation on the solar car. This is a really exciting opportunity to get young children interested in STEM and talk with them about solar vehicles — something the’ve probably never even thought of before.

ALX_0015-001sWe are also partnering with a FUSE program run by the Northwestern Office of STEM Education Partnerships. The FUSE program encourages kids to get involved in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics by providing mini-challenges and competitions for the kids to participate in. Participants work on their projects for several weeks and then upload a video or report to the FUSE website, where they are assessed and given coments by mentors.

One of the new FUSE challenges is to construct a small cardboard “solar car” and design it to travel as fast as possible. We will be visiting one of the schools participating in this contest with SC6 sometime in May. Kids really love solar cars (see right), so this will be an exciting opportunity for them.

 

We also have been working on fancy new publicity materials, including an acryllic-embeded logo (no picture, sorry), and new 3D-printed models of the solar car:

Photo: Look. A solar car!

This one still needs to be glued, but once complete, these models will hopefully allow us to give people a lot better idea of what our solar car is when we’re attending winter outreach events (like the ones mentioned above).

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