Car club motivates students to succeed in school
At Sandcreek Middle School about a dozen students are involved in a robotics club. Breaking and rebuilding remote-control cars is usually what they do, but there is more to this club than playing with cars.
Thursday’s assignment is to assess the cars for broken parts. Before the wheels could on the cars, students had to turn the wheels in their minds to figure out how to fix these broken remote control cars.
“We have to figure out what’s wrong with it so we can fix them and race them,” said Zack Grant, a seventh-grader.
“It’s really fun just fixing things,” said club president Jaden Magleby.
The boys share their passion for cars with their principal, Linden Oswald who leads the club.
“I’m a motor head too, I love these cars,” said Oswald.
Oswald says he started the club for kids who needed to get out of the classroom.
“You get to do hands-on instead of writing all that stuff,” said Grant.
“They think it’s going to be fun racing cars, but it doesn’t take long to figure out there’s math, engineering, why cars run, why sprockets have to turn, it opens up a whole world of STEM,” said Oswald.
Once the cars are fixed, the fun begins for the mini mechanics to test them out in the school parking lot.
sometimes they work.
Sometimes they work and sometimes the cars break, but it’s all a part of learning and using traditional school subjects in a non-traditional classroom.
Currently, all of the students are boys, but Oswald said there are a dozen girls who will be joining the club in the coming weeks.
