Turning Sunlight Into Speed
SPS members at Austin College prepare to race their boats.
Photos courtesy of the chapter.
Many campus organizations hosted events on climate change last year, leading up to the convocation of the 2025 Austin College Poset Leader-in-Residence Award recognizing Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy. After months of deliberating, our SPS chapter knew that to gather a large turnout and motivate learning, we needed to design a competition.
Boats. This strange pitch was made during one of our weekly meetings. After spending February and March discussing solar-powered car kits, we decided to be even MORE creative: Let’s take solar panels . . . and recyclables . . . and make boats.
Where were we going to race? In the school’s celebration fountains, of course. We worked with campus police and our campus management team to turn off the fountain sprayers, creating a perfect straightaway track.
A boat takes off during the big race at Austin College.
SPS officers took to soldering together simple circuits composed of solar panels, DC motors, and supercapacitors. The goal was to charge the super caps via the solar panels so that, at the flip of a switch—or the start of the race—the caps would begin to discharge, acting as a speed boost. After this approximately 45-second speed boost, the boats would continue running on power directly from the solar panels.
Hosting a solar-powered event in the spring was more challenging than we thought. We were rained out twice, and our third event day was partially cloudy. The cloudiness, however, did not hinder our circuits—or our lesson!
