DASH+ at the NAIAS Education Day

We are having a great time in Detroit, sharing the DASH+ opportunity with high school students and their teachers, and planning the grand prize experience for the ultimate winners of the DASH+ competition. We are here for Education Day at the NAIAS, and getting to take in all of the sights and sounds of the Auto Show.

We spent the day yesterday visiting the College for Creative Studies and The Henry Ford. We were able to spend time with representatives of the Transportation Design Department of The College for Creative Studies seeing the state of the art facilities where students learn the art of car design and create scale models of their designs. The students are incredibly skilled and talented and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of their designs on the road in the future.

In four fast-paced hours at the Henry Ford, we got a small sampling of the vast offerings and facilities of the museum complex, and the auto assembly plant. We saw incredible artifacts from the history of innovation in America, from chair design to steam locomotives to a modular home designed by Buckminster Fuller in 1946. So the museum is by no means just about cars, but there are plenty of those on display as well, going all the way back to Henry Ford’s first prototype of the Model T. We also explored Ford’s Rouge Plant where F150 trucks are assembled. We toured a working assembly line that would surely impress Henry Ford today. The plant also features an environmentally friendly green roof!

We are inspired by everything we saw yesterday and are currently brainstorming about sharing these experiences with the winning DASH+ team here in Detroit this summer.

Now we are on the floor of the Auto Show, in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE display area. We have an education corner here today, and are busy telling the hundreds of high school students in attendance about DASH+.

There’s still time to enter the DASH+ competition. Teams must register by February 1, and entries must be submitted by March 1.

--Mitch Aiken, Director of Education, Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE