The group of young women form the team Golden Diversity, who have qualified for the world final of the F1 in Schools STEM Challenge.

The competition is the world’s largest secondary school technology program and with over nine million students from 17,000 schools in 31 nations having been involved since it began in 2004.

In September the ladies will travel to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to take on the best of the best after becoming the first all-female senior team to win the national competition in March.

There are two major components that each team is judged on – engineering and enterprise.

“Basically students design, test and manufacture a miniature formula one car that's powered by a CO2 canister,” team manager Yara Alkhalili said. 

“But other than that we have to market our own team, gain sponsors, collaborate with industry, do some project management and finance.”

For anyone thinking that the challenge is already intimidating have no fear – the team said they started out with no experience at all and managed to build an impressive array of skills and knowledge to become competitive. 

“We had to learn about all the different programs we had to use and it took about six weeks before we had a car,” head engineer Hoai Nguyen said.

The team started the process with a computer design program called Autodesk Inventor Professional and eventually developed skills to move onto a more complex program called Fusion 360.

“Within that program we have to create a series of 2D sketches which we then create into a 3D model,” Miss Nguyen said.

The next step is creating computer coding for the car model the team have designed.

“Once you have coded it you send those codes to the milling machine, which then follows all the codes like instructions,” manufacturer Claire Cameron said.

“The milling machine is like a router with a drill piece and it mills out the car.”

The car then requires sanding, painting, and assembly of wheels and axles.

A 3D printer is also used to create particular components including the nose cone and the rear wings.

“It was pretty complex to be honest, there were booklets which were 120 pages long and we had to follow every step and it was really confusing learning the terms that we had to know,” Miss Nguyen said.

“You learn along the way and we had help from teams who had been competing in the past and after that we just kept developing our skills and here we are now.”

Between each competition – from state to national to world finals – the car design must be changed by 10 per cent.

“It keeps us developing our car and our skills so we keep learning and being more innovative in our design,” Miss Nguyen said.

“Within the design process we go through creating different prototypes, which are different versions of the car that we change to see what makes it better and what improves the aerodynamics.”

A 10 per cent change could be a newly designed axle system or different sized wheels, but the team test each modification in both virtual and real world simulations.

In the engineering half of the competition they are not only judged on how well the car performs under racing conditions but on their process of creating the final product.

The other half of the competition is the enterprise journey that the team have undertaken.

They are judged on a range of criteria which includes project management, finance, risk management, sponsorship, stakeholder engagement, collaboration, marketing, social media, brand, team identity and graphic design.

They must create a pit display at the competition in Malaysia which showcases all of their work and are interviewed about the process and asked marketing questions.

Inspiring others to enter STEM is also a major goal for the Golden Diversity team.

“We thought it would be cool to inspire our generation into STEM and we aren’t really just competing for ourselves,” Miss Alkhalili said.

“We also work with primary schools and we have mentored younger Queechy teams at our school and we try to inspire others to enter STEM because we see how much we have benefited from it, so we think it’s important that everyone else gets that opportunity.”

As one of the upcoming leading areas of employment, inspiring not only women but young people in general to study STEM is important to the team.

“It’s really the future of what our world will look like and having people who know about it and who are interested in it is going to be really helpful,” resource manager Eleanor Arumugam said.

“The rise of technology is rapidly growing and it’s our generation who are going to be filling those roles in the community and designing the new things.”

The group of six each joined the team for different reasons, from wanting to extend themselves, to spending more time with friends or wanting to gain increased confidence but there is one thing they all agree on.

“It’s definitely opened a lot of doors for future career paths and we have learnt a lot of skills that can be really useful in the future,” Miss Arumugam said.

There is still a lot of work for the team to do ahead of the finals in September, including reaching a $60,000 fundraising goal.

“Most of the money goes towards flights and accommodation which is the most expensive part of the trip but it also goes towards manufacturing the car, marketing materials, design and all the work in the competition,” Miss Arumugam said.

The ladies are about halfway to their fundraising goal and have a number of initiatives planned, including a shopping extravaganza on August 18.

RELATED STORIES: