Students at Somerset High School are putting engineering skills to good use by building their own solar powered car.

The team is known as the Somerset Solar Jumpers Play-Off, their mascot, the Brier Jumpers, and they're preparing for a national competition.

Our Emily Sisk gives us an inside look at their work.

Nearly every day of summer, students and advisors can be found in the shop building, something you don't see every day.

It's a solar powered car, which is fully operational and designed by the students themselves.

For everything we're doing, we've done it ourselves.

We designed the crush zone.

We made the crush zone.

I didn't know how to weld.

Now I can weld a good bit.

I can confidently say that I can build a car completely, like, on my own, to go in and watch.

These kids have gone from having no mechanical knowledge to welding their own chassis, doing, doing a wheel alignment.

These are terms I'm familiar with, the new from the car world, but, I mean, that's not the kind of things that traditionally kids are learning.

There's a lot of tools in here that I never knew how to use, and I never knew, like how cars work in general.

I mean, this is obviously different than a car like, say, out there, but still, it's just cool to get this experience.

The Silver Car Challenge is a national program for high schools to give students first hand engineering experience.

Brian Coleman is the head advisor of the team.

He came to Somerset after starting a successful program at Bath County for many the students.

It was his encouragement that led them to get involved.

I've always been interested in engineering.

I love math, especially science too.

He asked me if I wanted to join the team, and I was kind of like, I don't know, because no girls were in it.

And I was like, I don't know if I'd like to work with guys.

I guess I found a place in here where I didn't really feel judged, introduced me into something new, and I wanted to develop new skills to the students.

Have been working all year for the opportunity to travel to Dallas, Texas for the national competition.

But besides building the car, it's taken a lot of work to make the trip a reality.

We had to fundraise for the trip.

It costs a lot of money to be able to build a car and then to be able to travel, so I kind of help make sure that oversea, all that, the process we made to get our money through sponsorships we do throughout the community will meet with many different local businesses to get sponsorships to help build the car.

Most of the teams there and not to knock on them, but most of those teams are magnet schools, charter schools.

They are.

They've got a singular sponsor that we were the only car that looked like a NASCAR just had, you know, a ton of sponsors on the side of the car.

When the students arrive in Dallas, Texas, next week, the work is not finished.

They'll go through a multi-day process of what's called a scrutiny hearing, where judges scrutinize their work and determine if they're allowed to hit the track.

It's not a joke.

It's not a, Hey, great job you made it here.

So everybody gets to play.

You've got to meet the requirements or you don't get on the track.

It's the Dallas.

You know, it's, It's the Texas Motor Speedway.

There's a bunch of different judges and there's different stations.

There's different checkpoints you have to pass to make sure your car is qualified and safe to compete.

It is collaboration over competition.

The race is fun and we we challenge.

And when we're racing we are trying to win.

But when push comes to shove, if your car breaks down or if another team's car breaks down, all the other students from the other teams are going to come over and help you fix it.

The summer sets are where jumpers have a reputation of success.

In Dallas last year they were national champions in their division, but winning doesn't just mean the first to cross a finish line.

The race happens over the course of four days.

It's an endurance race and it's an efficiency race.

The winning team for your division is the team that has the most laps at the end.

Our goal is we wish to gain, as many laps as we can.

Specifically, our number is 500.

We're looking for in a school of just over 500 students.

The community support has made all the difference.

You don't have to have a ton of resources to be able to compete.

You don't have to be from the area you want to be from a big school.

You can be from anywhere, as long as you can take the time and dedication to get it done, or just do what's best for kids.

And if that means that sometimes kids make a little noise, we don't just tolerate it, we kind of get excited for it.

It's a blessing.

I guess you could say it's a blessing to represent Somerset for Kentucky Edition.

I'm Emily, says.

Thank you so much, Emily.

The students will travel to Dallas for the competition on July 15th.

Many of this year's graduating seniors plan to study engineering at U-K or U of L this fall.