University High School doesn't have a varsity football team. They do, however, have something a little more, well, innovative.

"We don't have a lot of sports here," UHS teacher Jason Beatty said. "So, for us, this is our varsity football team."

Beatty is referring to the school's Innovative Vehicle Design team, which is a group of students that build an electric car for competition. Beatty is also the adviser to the IVD students.

The IVD team has built three cars since the creation of UHS five years ago and each of them has been entered into the International Convergence Conference at Cobo Hall. Last October, the team won five trophies, including a first-place award for Presentation (its third year in a row) for their vehicle they named the Batmobile.

"For the kids that really work at it, this means a lot to them," Beatty said.

UHS is an alternative high school that focuses on college preparation and success.

IVD started as an afterschool program, but for the first time this school year, is now an actual class.

Beatty said there are 14 enrolled in the class this year, but that number is not as high as he would like it to be. "I just think some students aren't aware that IVD exists or what it is yet," Beatty said. "We're getting the word out. I do have a lot of students coming up to me asking what IVD is and how they might get involved. We're working on it."

The goal of the class is to assemble a drivable car – either from the ground up or from a basic model car called a "kit car" – using two 12-volt batteries. The competition pulls in high schools from across the state to see whose car can go the farthest with these two batteries.

"We went 9.1 miles in an hour," De'Laun Lofton, a 17-year-old senior at UHS said. "I think we can get it up to about 20 miles per hour."

Lofton has been part of the team since he joined UHS as a freshman when it was just an afterschool program.

"Our goal this year was to make our car street legal," Lofton said. "We wanted to be able to drive this on the road. We just need a license plate, some headlights, taillights, and it would be street legal."

The first class is a design class and is available to juniors and seniors. During this class, the students learn various automobile design concepts. Beatty said there is a little of everything, from structural analysis to computer-aided design, to analyzing suspension and steering.

"By the end of the year they will completely design a vehicle model," Beatty said. "They'll determine its performance characteristics, how fast it goes, its acceleration, how far it might go, the parts they'll need to buy."

Students have to pass the first class to get to the second one, which is the build class, during which the car is assembled. Beatty admits this is the class the students enjoy more.

"They are not always interested in the first class," Beatty said. "They really want to build."

The first year of the IVD team, the students used a kit car, which means they bought a kit and basically installed the battery. The second year they purchased a dune buggy and modified it in various ways for the battery and the competition, and assembled it all themselves. This year, they'll build from the ground up as well.

"The class is pretty heavy math, up to trigonometry but no calculus," Beatty said. "It's college-level engineering."

The program is sponsored by Square One Education Network which provides funding to K-12 schools that focus on STEM (science, technology, education and mathematics) programs. Through this program, Square One matches $5,000 with a corporation sponsoring the IVD team. Unfortunately this year UHS didn't have a corporate sponsor so Square One funded them the entire $10,000. With that money, Beatty and the IVD students are able to buy the parts they need to build out their car.

The competition is one part of it, but to Lofton and the other kids involved, there's another aspect they take away from the team.

"I always liked creating but wasn't sure what I wanted to do," said 18-year-old senior Emerson Farrow. "I got this chance to work with materials but it wasn't really work. I got to create and do it for free."

Farrow will attend Michigan Tech next year to study chemical engineering. "I haven't messed up that much but I feel I owe the world something," Farrow said. "I want to take all of our excess waste and turn it into a product or energy to improve recycling. … I'd like to clean up the world."

Lofton will attend Oklahoma University in the fall and pursue a degree in petroleum engineering. He said he hopes to find ways to drill more efficiently for oil.

"One of the reasons I came to this school was to be a part of the IVD team and the engineering programs," Lofton said.

"(The IVD team) taught me adaptation," Farrow said. "A lot of things don't go your way but you just have to move on to another day."