The loud chatter of the room quiets as Solar Car Club president, Elsa Lagerblad, moves to the front of the room. Students listen as Lagerblad explains electric engines while using her own solar car for reference.
Palo Alto High School’s Solar Car Club aims to get more students involved in sustainable engineering biweekly on Mondays in the engineering classroom.
Club president Elsa Lagerblad says that the club provides a new lens to STEM.
“We’re living in an unprecedented time of climate change and of more awareness about green technology,” Lagerblad said. “While we have a really big STEM focus here at Paly, I feel like sometimes what we’re missing is a sustainability- and environmental-centric STEM focus. By having this club, not only are we doing a lot of hands-on STEM engineering work, which is good, and people love that, but we’re also kind of bringing it through a new lens that we don’t often get at Paly.”
Co-president Laura Zhang said that the club has also built a community around learning about solar engineering.
“The most rewarding experience for me is really getting to know more about solar cars in general and I feel like I’ve learned more about the community around it,” Zhang said. “There’s not many courses about solar cars and solar engineering in general, so I think it helps to understand more about engineering for people who want to learn more.”
According to Lagerblad, the club will be providing more opportunities for its members to learn about solar cars.
“People can either choose to do this more hands-on project where they build a little mini solar car and race it around Paly or they’re going to be doing a little mini research project,” Lagerblad said. “We’re really excited to be doing our solar car projects.”
Luana Le, a freshman student in the club, shared her experience on the project.
“We just started our solar car projects where we each got assigned individual roles to help build a car with our team,” Le said. “My role is designer. I help design the car and make it look good.”
Lagerblad said she hopes that students will take away more than knowledge about solar cars, but of broader skills.
“I hope that they [club members] take away a lot more knowledge about how the state of sustainable engineering is,” Lagerblad said. “I hope they take away a passion for doing this kind of hands-on work and working in a team because that’s a big part of it as well as just being in a team and being collaborative within your engineering.”