Wheeler Celeritas Racing Team members from L-R: Chase Waddington, Mateen Jangda, Sai Rajendrakumar and Davis Nilson. Submitted photo.
Last summer we told you about the Aeroflow Racing Team from the Wheeler Magnet School as they prepared for an international F1 competition.
Their successor is called the Celeritas Racing Team, and one of their team members, Shashaank Aiyer, got in touch to let us know that they’re prepping for the F1 in Schools National Competition in Austin, Texas from Feb. 20-23.
Shashaank tells us the Celeritas team is comprised of six juniors who’ll be taking part in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary challenge “in which teams design, analyze, manufacture, and test miniature F1 cars that are powered by compressed carbon dioxide and raced down a track.”
The Celeritas team members and their responsibilities are as follows:
Shashaank Aiyer, executive manager and graphic designer;
Chase Waddington, manufacturing engineer;
Jared Ryley, design engineer;
Sai Rajendrakumar, marketing director;
Mateen Jangda, financial manager;
Davis Nilson, resource director and web designer.
Last year’s Wheeler team won the U.S. competition and finished 15th in the global event in Singapore.
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Wheeler Magnet School student Ryan Davis demonstrates his “Reactive LED Hoodie” at the school’s STEAM symposium in April 2018. (ECN file)
The Wheeler STEM program is regarded as the No. 2 STEM program in the country, according to an educational survey.
Study.com placed the Wheeler STEM program only behind Stuyvesant High School in New York City on a list of the Top 30 STEM programs in American high schools.
According to Study.com, which describes itself as an online educational resource, the Wheeler STEM program:
” . . . also [has] been recognized for their outreach in helping other schools develop STEM programs. The STEM Center offers an accelerated and advanced course of study focusing on medical biotechnology, engineering/robotics, chemical engineering and advanced chemistry. The program culminates in senior research and internships with local business and institution partners. Students have the opportunity to take twice as many math and science courses as they would in a traditional curriculum.”
The formal name for the Wheeler STEM program is the Center for Advanced Studies. It was started as a magnet program in 1997. (STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.)
For the last six years, Wheeler also has held a STEAM symposium that reaches out to the whole student body.
Many of the other schools on the Study.com list are schools specializing in STEM programs, including the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, as well as elite private schools in the Northeast and San Francisco Bay Area.
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Thanks to Maureen Klinkmueller of the Wheeler Magnet School for the info and photo:
Ava Reau Autera, a junior at The Center for Advanced Studies at Wheeler High School in Cobb County, scored a 36 Composite score on the ACT. In 2017, 2.03 million high school students took the ACT, and only .136% earned a composite score of 36.
Autera joins fellow magnet student Alessa Culinan, whom we posted about back in August.
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From L-R, Wheeler F1 racing team members Shivam Patel, Michael Jin and Arul Gupta. (East Cobb News photo by Wendy Parker)
Members of the Wheeler F1 racing team had barely gotten off the plane after winning a national competition in June when they knew what they had to do next.
“We were on cloud nine for about three hours,” said Arul Gupta, the executive manager and marketing director of the AeroFlow Racing team, which includes five students who attend the Wheeler STEM Magnet School.
They’re spending what’s left of their summer redesigning their foam and light plastic miniature vehicle for the F1 in Schools world competition in Singapore in September.
They know they have to step up their game in marketing, project management, promotions, community outreach and fundraising—the other components of the entrepreneurially-constructed F1 in Schools concept—in facing the global elites of the circuit for the first time.
There’s little time to waste.
“We’re doing prototypes now” for the cars they want to take to Singapore, said Michael Jin, the manufacturing engineer for Aeroflow Racing.
At the F1 in Schools National Finals in Austin, Texas, their car posted a time of 1.3 seconds along a track of 24 meters, or 78 feet (as they demonstrated in April at the Wheeler STEAM Symposium), the best time of all the cars there.
In Singapore, Gupta said, “1.3 isn’t going to cut it.” He figures Aeroflow needs to cut it down to 1.1 seconds to have a shot against the elite teams, especially those coming from Australia and Britain, the hotbeds for F1 in Schools.
The AeroFlow team scored around 920 points out of a possible 1000 in all phases of the national competition, which included teams with ages ranging from 9 to 19.
While team members are proud of that, they know that most of the 40 teams heading to Asia are more experienced than AeroFlow, which was formed in the fall of 2016. The global competition, Gupta said, is also “much more rigorous” in judging.
“They don’t grade just how fast your car goes,” he said. “They judge design, marketing, social media strategy, all of that.”
The AeroFlow team even had to design and update its own website as part of the competition.
The victorious Wheeler F1 racing team car at the U.S. Nationals. (AeroFlow Racing photo)
Last year, the Wheeler students finished fifth in their maiden national competition. “We wanted to the best we could,” said Gupta, who lives in the Pope High School district and who like his fellow AeroFlow team members commutes to classes at Wheeler. “It gave us a better idea what we had to improve upon.”
The speed of the car had to get better, and they decided making it as light as possible was the key.
Getting that weight to 50 grams, the minimum allowed in F1 in Schools, is an exacting and time-consuming task.
That task fell largely to Jin, who lives in the Walton High School district. “When you’re making a car, getting the design right is so important,” he said. “Adding a couple of coats of paint can make a big difference.”
The construction includes forming the car body out of a foam block, then adding plastic components that include the wheels and other elements that enhance speed.
As they were evolving their model over the last school year, the AeroFlow team members consulted with Georgia Tech aerospace engineering professors who advised them on lift and downforce.
“The car’s acting almost like a rocket,” Gupta said.
“The real difficulty is getting the right finishing on it,” Jin said, with the ideal being “a perfectly smooth surface.”
Added Gupta: “It should be smooth as glass,” with a glossy look.
The AeroFlow car turned in a time of 1.13 seconds at the Wheeler STEAM Symposium in April. (East Cobb News file photo)
The intricate attention to detail in F1 in Schools is paramount, but the rising Wheeler seniors on the AeroFlow team say they embrace the challenge that’s largely outside the classroom.
While they submit college applications (among the schools are MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech, Stanford, Georgia Tech and Emory), they enjoy learning the well-rounded skills they have to develop.
“You get to be extremely hands-on,” said Gupta, who in his role works with Novelis, an aluminum products manufacturer that is AeroFlow’s main corporate sponsor.
Even the AeroFlow name came after a lot of thought among team members. “How can we be known for something that’s related to what we’re doing,” he said. “That sounds about right.”
Jin said he especially likes the chance to “simulate the real world” and “this shows what drives innovation.
“We feel like we’re in a pretty good place. We know what our competition is and what we are doing well.”
The other immediate challenge the AeroFlow team has is raising money to make the trip to Singapore.
They estimated that all their costs, from entry fees to air fare, food and lodging, will cost around $37,000.
Thus far, they’ve raised around $24,000, with less than two months before their trip.
The AeroFlow team has created a GoFundMe page to accept donations from anyone wishing to help out.
The Wheeler-based AeroFlow team members after winning the U.S. Nationals in Austin, Texas, in June. (AeroFlow Racing photo)
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Students at the ‘Winglets of Aviation’ project get a release of pressurized air in their faces. (East Cobb News photos and slideshow by Wendy Parker)
For the first time in its six-year history, the Wheeler STEAM Symposium invited elementary school students to take part in its wide-ranging collection of class and laboratory projects.
Students from many Wheeler feeder schools toured the Wildcat Arena Wednesday morning to learn from their high school counterparts, who were more than happy to explain how they’ve blending high-level science and engineering knowledge with concepts from the creative arts.
For the last three years, the STEAM concept has been on display at the symposium, and earlier this school year Wheeler became the first high school in the state to receive official STEAM certification from the Georgia Department of Education.
Wheeler junior Ryan Davis was literally wearing his project, a lit multi-colored strap he calls Reactive LED Hoodie. He can change the colors and “make it a rainbow,” said Davis, who also has set the project to music streaming through a nearby laptop.
“I enjoy doing electronics for fun and am interested in wearable technology,” he said, as the device changed from yellow to green to blue to red and other colors.
Another Wheeler junior, Abigail Ochal, said her engineering class semester project, 3D Printing Plastic Filament Extruder, is designed to extract recyclable plastics from 3D printing materials. She couldn’t turn on the device with a big crowd around, however, since temperatures flare up in excess of 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, Ochal demonstrated on her laptop how the plastic pellets stream out.
More familiar robotics contraptions were also tooling around on the gym floor, and Wheeler’s F1 in Schools students drew a big crowd with their speed demonstrations down a 16-meter aluminum track.
Wheeler junior Poojan Mehta, who’s part of the AeroFlow Racing team, said recent test runs have averaged around 1.1 seconds. But while we watched, we saw what he said was the best time they’ve seen thus far, 0.996 seconds. He said the cars are designed with computer technology, and the runs are examined there as well for insights as to how to make them run even faster.
In previous years, the Wheeler STEAM Symposium was held at night, and initially it featured the work of students within the Wheeler Magnet School.
Now, says assistant principal Cheryl Crooks, head of the magnet school and Wheeler STEAM Symposium, the event has expanded to the entire school body, with outreach to students and lower school levels.
“Let’s make it inclusive, and let’s invite everybody from the school,” she said. STEAM, Crooks added, can be for “every student, every teacher and at every level.”
Elementary students also were recognized for their projects, another first for the symposium.
“Our students looked like they enjoyed it more” seeing their visitors react to their projects, Crooks said. “It really validates what they’re doing.”
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