SRP Model Car Program Discontinued
Student Racing Partners was founded in 2001 and closed its doors in 2010. In that time we served about 2,500 students who put in about 80,000 class hours at 40+ school sites to complete the 30 hour model car program. Student Racing Partners, like so many other worthy programs, fell victim to the budget cuts that provided programs for kids to build real, physical, tangible projects like radio controlled model race cars.
Here are a few reasons I hope schools in California, and around the US, will once again find the resources to get kids building things like radio control model race cars:
1. Building things is a good way to teach students math and science. For example, I found students retained a better understanding of fractions when I presented gears in the cars as numerators and denominators. In the same way I found that students really seemed to get a better understanding of inertia and the idea of trade off’s when they were presented with the choice of what gear ratios to choose for their cars.
2. Building radio control cars is a perfect pre robotics course. I suspect that the students who participate in FIRST robotics challenges in high school do better in all areas of academics than the average student. Radio control model cars are a great first step to get kids interested in robotics because they have the hooks like 1) Spray Paint, 2) Speed and 3) a Cool factor. These hooks should not be dismissed; there are a lot of students in Jr. High who we worked with that ended up with a much stronger interest to participate in High School Science because of these hooks.
3. Kids who work on long term, hands on projects in small teams benefit from the frustration and elation that comes from learning to delegate, negotiate, and celebrate as a cohesive unit.
So now that Student Racing Partners has closed, I am moving on to become a full time teacher to apply some of these lessons during the school day. Feel free to contact me at 408-480-2902 or ken@student-racing.com
