Rocket City High School Engineering Projects

Do you wish you could go back and relive high school or college? I hear it quite a bit these days from engineers. It’s not just wisdom talking, wishing they could go back in time knowing all they know now. It’s jealousy talking.

At Solid Edge University, Mike Evans from the Huntsville Center of Technology presented several commercial projects that high school students in Huntsville, Alabama, are involved with.

 

The projects are so cool that even college engineers are returning to be mentors so they can get more hands-on experience.

So take a listen to my interview with Mike and learn more about the programs he mentions below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii5WBLeaZic

Rocket City Space Pioneers are out to prove commercial space exploration can be affordable and sustainable. The pioneers are a team of Alabama businesses and organizations. They are one of 26 teams attempting to win the Google Lunar X PRIZE. The competition awards $30 million in prizes to the first privately funded teams who safely land a robot on the moon that then travels 500 meters and send images back to Earth. Here is a video of team leader Tim Pickens explaining more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys5e5-KIcMk

HUNCH stands for high school students united with NASA to create hardware. NASA works with the next generation of engineers on cost-effective hardware and soft goods. Students apply their science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills to develop real-world products for NASA.

Greenpower is a design-make-race challenge to promote sustainable engineering to young people. Hopefully you already saw the Inspiring Future Engineers with Greenpower blog post. Be sure to check out TeamUSA’s Facebook page.

Mike emphasizes the importance of these programs at the high school level:

“If we want to guide students into engineering, we have to start at an earlier age.”