We have a number great activities and programs here at UNC Charlotte for high school students to check out.
Check out our Racing Summer Camp. To get email notifications for summer camp registration, please contact Chuck Riordan at criordan@uncc.edu
For previous year campers, access to the full Summer Camp picture albumincluding each camper in their race car, please email Dr. Peter Tkacik at ptkacik@uncc.edu and include what you are doing, where you might have gone to school, and if so, what degree you would be working on.
In order to engage more high school students with engineering, we have developed a summer camp program. This program is done through the summer programs at UNC Charlotte. It includes three week long sessions of eight students each. It incorporates the three main disciplines in engineering under a motorsports umbrella. These are Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.
ASPIRE MOTORSPORTS SUMMER CAMP
Project Goal:
Increase Freshman Enrollment by Inviting High School Students Interested in Engineering to Participate in a Week Long, Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Camp that Exposes Them to Mechanical, Electrical, and Civil Engineering By Way of a Motorsports Themed Camp
Each summer, the project team collaborates with UNC Charlotte Summer Programs to organize the “ASPIRE Motorsports Summer Camp”. Approximately 24 high school students are invited to participate in an on-campus engineering experience. They stay on campus and are surrounded by interactive engineering activities for five days while learning basic concepts of Mechanical, Electrical, and Civil Engineering. The Motorsports Engineering facilities and contacts are utilized as a way to bring all disciplines together and create an interactive, themed learning environment for the students.
During the summer 2010, 27 high school students attended this camp (8 female and 19 males). Ethnic information was not collected but the group was quite diverse as displayed in the following photograph. Ethnic information will be collected for all camps moving forward.
The students participated in the following field trips/tours:
| Race car parking lot outing |
| Tour of Hendricks Motorsports |
| Mini Baja trail testing experiments |
| Race engine dyno testing |
| Rocket nozzle laboratory |
| CAD design lesson |
| Formula, Legends, and COT NASCAR race cars |
| Pavement testing experiments |
| UNC Charlotte Water Tunnel tour |
This should be you in this helmet!
This was all supported by a program called:
Increasing Enrollment and Retention in the College of Engineering Using a Multi-disciplinary Motorsports Theme at UNC Charlotte
Check out the Motorsports program in the William States Lee College of Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This program titled “Increasing Enrollment and Retention in the College of Engineering Using a Multi-Disciplinary Motorsports Theme” has been supported with a grant from the National Science Foundation
NSF Research Grant #0856716
