Awards & Recognition • Mississippi State student engineering teams earn regional awards
• Adrienne Minerick awarded NSF CAREER Award
• Computer engineering major receives NSF fellowship

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Imagine being a pre-teen and having an opportunity to transform the environment by building a car that uses diesel and electricity for power instead of gasoline. The impact of such an invention would be beneficial to all of society.  Thanks to university, government and corporate collaborations sixth, seventh and eighth graders are being given such opportunities.

It all begins at the college level with the Challenge X project.  Challenge X: Cross over to Sustainable Mobility is a program that is giving college engineering students from 17 select universities an opportunity to create innovative solutions for more fuel efficient and environmental friendly vehicles. The catch is using an existing gasoline-powered car and changing it into a hybrid electric vehicle.  In this case, the students will re-engineer the Chevrolet Equinox.  Mississippi State University was chosen as a finalist for this program and will be conducting their research at the university’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) research facility at Mississippi State University.  

This spring the MSU Challenge X team received an invitation from the Society of Automotive Engineers to attend the SAE Hybrid Vehicle Technologies Symposium. Out of the 17 teams located across the United States, Mississippi State and San Diego State were the only two teams invited to the symposium. David Oglesby is an MSU graduate student and the program manager for the MSU Challenge X team.  He attended the conference in San Diego, California to present the findings of MSU’s hybrid research. In addition, Oglesby displayed a detailed timeline of the progress made by the Challenge X team, including how they chose their vehicle design, what components were to be used on the vehicle, and the educational outreach efforts made during their three years of working on this project. More than 400 spectators heard the presentation. 

Another important component of the project is to promote environmentally safe engineering to grade and high school students.  MSU and the San Diego State University Challenge X team created a cooperative outreach effort and as a result visited fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade classrooms to teach students about the need for more environmentally safe, fuel-efficient cars that can counteract global warming and other harmful effects on the environment.  The students had an advantage of experiencing first-hand the importance of building relationships and respect for team members.  While giving their presentation MSU and SDU demonstrated why networking and swapping ideas about strategies are important components of successful project management and effective execution.

 The first three years of Challenge X: Cross Over to Sustainable Mobility has been so successful in exploring clean efficient automotive technologies and educating young people about preserving the environment through designing “greener” automobiles that General Motors and the U.S. Department of Energy—the sponsors of the program—have extended the research program for another year.   Originally 60 universities submitted application to be part of this competitive program.  MSU was among the 17 that were selected.

Every year the finalists come together to demonstrate their progress at a GM designated location.  In June, students from MSU will be traveling to the General Motors headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan to show off their research and progress. However the winning design is yet to be discovered and the winner of the $20,000 prize money will be awarded in 2008.

For more information about the MSU Challenge X team, visit www.msuchallengex.com.

Story by: Laura Eakes & Diane L. Godwin