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Kids watch submarine races
July 27, 2007

High school and college age kids have been sitting together in cars watching "submarine races" for a long time. It's good to know that sometimes there are actually submarines involved.

I received an interesting press release from a company I'd never heard of called igus talking about how they had donated products to be used in a student submarine race. OK, that kind of thing doesn't arrive every day, so it got my attention. In my areas of coverage at Control Engineering, I don't spend a lot of time with plastic bearings nor do I generally discuss submarines. However I had to look into this.

There is an organization called International Submarine Races which is based in Brunswick, ME, and seems to have some loose association with General Dynamics Electric Boat Division. Every two years they have races for students, mostly in high school and college, that build human powered submarines. If they'd had that when I was in high school, I would have been all over it.

There are other contests like this. The Shell Eco Marathon comes to mind.

Personally, I can't think of any better ways to encourage young people to get involved in our industries than competitions like these. We need more sponsoring groups, and we should be doing everything we can to support such events. They don't all have to be as large or elaborate to be beneficial. Building teamwork, creativity and engineering skills is something we should all be about.

Posted by Peter Welander on July 27, 2007 | Comments (1)