Parking Lot
Showdown
Students Race Food
Trucks to Raise Money
At Saint Maximilian Kolbe School in West Chester,
students are participating in a different kind of food fight.
It’s called the Solar Food Truck Project. For this year’s
assignment, eighth graders designed and built miniature
solar-powered food trucks, each with its own signature
dish. Then they raised funds for charity, engaging donors
in the weeks leading up to a much-anticipated food
truck race.
“It’s not just learning something in a book or on paper,”
says Patricia Frantz, the art teacher who oversaw the
project alongside eighth grade teacher Patricia Guerin
and science teacher Mary Riccardo. “If you’re about to
race but your wheel falls off, what do you do? How do you
finance your truck? The students learned to actually carry
these concepts out in real life.”
The cross-classroom collaboration began with a
conversation among faculty. What started as a lesson on
solar power became an opportunity to encourage creative
food truck designs. Incorporating dishes and pricing
brought math into the mix. The project rounded out with
a tie-in to the yearly eighth-grade service project.
“A lot of teachers will come to me to figure out how to
make a lesson more hands-on and interdisciplinary,”
Frantz says. “So you can take what you’re learning in
one subject and put it through at least two or
three other subjects.”
8
In this case, students got a full combination of science,
art, math, technology, engineering, and service. Over
three months, the students worked in pairs to build
business plans and solar-powered vehicles for a total of
13 food trucks.
The groups faced bumps along the way. To begin, the
students wired solar panels and motors to their miniature
wheelbases, capturing data on charts to determine the
optimal angle for the solar panels. But the truck frames
didn’t always align with their chosen food truck themes,
forcing students to weigh priorities like speed and style,
form and function.