Competition revs up at FGCU Solar Go-kart races

Thirteen solar-powered go-karts and Nine Florida high schools: all competing for the chance to win the 12th annual Sunchase Solar Go-kart race at Florida Gulf Coast University.

“Each team produces a car, you know, some of them weld it from the ground up, and some of them have a car that they’ve had for years, and they can bring it out and modify it,” said the Director of the Whitaker Center for STEM Education, Heather Skaza-Acosta.

“They spend all year with usually a teacher coach or a mentor, modifying the car, building the car, and testing the car.” said Skaza-Acosta.

They modify and test until the day comes when they can race it out on the coned-off track at FGCU.

The teams were all confident in their abilities.

“We feel pretty great. I mean, we’ve done great over the past few years, and we’ve definitely tried to make changes to improve,” said Matthew Duncan with the Sol-train team, “There’s one motto that we go by for this year, the most that Brett knows if you want to say”

“We don’t want to try and reinvent the wheel,” said Brett Buzzard, “We just want to optimize what we have.”

Lissandra Jaime on the Golden Girls team says she’s proud of her work.

“We’re really happy with them,” Jamie said, “That’s my baby. I’ve worked on it a lot.”

Building these go-karts is an opportunity for students to showcase all that they’ve learned in their STEM classes and get into topics their classes don’t touch on.

Competitions like this allow students to dive further into something they might be interested in pursuing as a career later in life.

“Whenever I found out that this was a team at our school, I got excited and I wanted to join because I wanted to learn more about mechanics and you know, how cars and stuff work,” said Julia Ribaudo on the Sol-Train team, “I think it could help me in the future.”

But for Golden Gate High School’s Golden Girls, It’s a chance to prove anyone can have a passion for STEM.

“We always work together with like, a whole family,” said Jaime, “And we wanted to like [show that] girls can do it too because a lot of girls are not interested in this.”

Many of these students not only go on to pursue degrees and careers in STEM but also choose to attend FGCU.

Alumni and judges of this morning’s race have also previously competed in this annual competition.