Autonomous Power Racing (APR)

APR is the official league to build and race small scale self-driving cars. 

Schools today struggle with providing students great ways to signal their potential to higher education and employers. The culture around learning  is stagnant. Everyone is used to the format of just taking a class and memorizing words for a test. Boring. The question is how do you give students an interesting way to learn and an opportunity to signal their potential?

If you want to fix this, you have to build a culture that embodies what they’re learning. Take the content being taught and give them real-world applications to which they can apply. APR is the official league to build and race small scale self-driving cars. It's set up to help educators reinforce students' interest in technology and STEM. They get to oversee a cool, new on-campus activity.

The world begins in local communities. Students and educators engage in that world every day. APR gives kids in these communities robots to build, race, and show off their potential. It’s about helping them gain the skills to ensure they have jobs in the future and the means to solve pressing challenges. This is the best environment in which students and educators can apply their imaginations. Iterations of ideas are how cultures evolve. 

APR is an application of the growing self-driving car industry. 

By helping students build small scale cars (1/16th scale) with inexpensive hardware and simple open-source software, they'll further develop their knowledge pertaining to robotics. We're helping students equip themselves with the tools needed to solve computing challenges.

After they build and test their cars, they race them against each other and other schools. With this we've not only created a flexible curriculum, but also localized research and development of a nascent industry at the grassroots level. 

Aside from self-driving car technology being nascent, it needs be understood that in order for the student to really understand how to build and learn; it needs to be as close to the real thing as possible. 

Watching simulations, reading books, etc are all good for understanding concepts. Having the student build, take things apart, and interact with the tech in the context in which their minds work at that level will do much more for them in the long run. 

The first step is to build out league infrastructure in several metropolitan areas of the US: SF Bay Area, NYC, DC. 

Our focus is on disadvantaged school districts in which students have the enthusiasm, but not the means to participate. 

After engaging every major metropolitan city, we're going to focus on middle America. We will begin with areas that don't have as much exposure to this technology. 

As we grow, we'll work with schools in developing countries. Over time, global community of young engineers will have been formed focusing on solving computing challenges most pressing to their environment. 

Students and Educators can source the materials needed to build a car themselves (we'll provide a guide) or they can purchase a kit from APR. Student teams will register on the APR website and have access to the leaderboard and can engage with the rest of the community. 

We're currently serving 12 students ranging within the ages of 13-17. 

The first group of students participated in a workshop we hosted at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May in which they built out their own cars to take home and experiment. 

The 2nd group visited our website and reached out to us. They currently have a car built out and are awaiting the upcoming inaugural season. 

We expect to serve approximately 2,000 students from the Bay Area and NYC. We'll help host local and regional races. For those students having issues in building one, we'll host workshops in which they'lll build their own and teachers can be trained in instructing with this technology. 

In 3 years we'll have expanded into other cities, have experienced teachers host workshops, and more races allowing students to interact with those in different regions. 

Students will walk away with lasting bonds and be more confident in learning complex technology. Teachers will feel more equipped to prepare their students to adapt quickly.

Our team is comprised of systems, mechanical, and software engineers with entrepreneurial backgrounds. 

They have experience from companies such as Voyage (Self-driving car company in the Bay Area), Boeing, Slack, and Lockheed Martin. 

We're currently exploring the revenue model in regards to for-profit side to ensure it's accessible as much as possible for students. 

Solve's initiative to connect the brightest in order to find solutions for the most pressing global issues falls right in line with what we're doing at APR.

Before we decided to embark upon this endeavor of building APR, we knew it couldn't be done alone, but we know we can provide the tools for the younger generations to build communities of innovation.  

Solve can help us reach difficult regions and ensure we build a self-sustaining system of problem solvers. 

• Building out a mentor network, especially in regions lacking the right resources. 
  • Solve can help us figure out the best way to provide the best guidance to students at scale
• Impactful media visibility of the students and educators' work
  • Solve  can help us shine the light where it's most deserved on the students and school faculty. This will serve as positive reinforcement loop of which we can build a rich culture of learning.