Euskelec. Official presentation of the IES Miralbueno car and team.

Automotive vocational training in the Aragonese region will be taking part this weekend in the Euskelec 2021 championship of electric vehicles made by vocational training students, which is being held in Bilbao.

A total of 19 teams are taking part in the final phase of this championship in which IES Miralbueno de Zaragoza will be representing Aragon, together with fourteen vocational training centres from the Basque Country and four from the Community of Cantabria.

The Director General of Innovation and Vocational Training of the Government of Aragon, Toni Martinez, has been this morning at the Innovation Centre for Vocational Training of Aragon (CIFPA) with the team of IES Miralbueno and stressed that this initiative is a pedagogical challenge to unite the training in the classroom with the professional reality. For their part, the participating students emphasised the educational value of this proposal, which forces them to work as a team and to look for solutions to real problems. Cecilia Latorre, a student on the Intermediate Level Automotive Vehicle Electromechanics course, considers that taking part in this challenge has been very beneficial "because of the fluency we have been able to acquire". The driver for the Aragonese car will be Alejandro Martín, a student on the Intermediate Level Bodywork course, who, despite not having been able to practice much, is confident that the Aragonese team will finish in a good position.

The teacher at IES Miralbueno, Rafael Pérez, indicates that the design and construction of the vehicle has involved the participation of students from three training cycles: the Higher Degree in Automotive and the Intermediate Degrees in Bodywork and Electromechanics. For Rafael Pérez, the involvement of the students has been total and they have had to apply to this project what they have learnt in practically all the training modules.

This Saturday, 29 May, from seven o'clock in the morning, the centre of Bilbao will become a race track where the protagonists will be the students and teachers of Vocational Training who have been working throughout the course on the development of their electric vehicle. In the Euskelec 2021 competition, the participants, in teams, design and build an electric vehicle on a common motor base (motor, motor controller and batteries) with the aim of promoting teamwork and basing experimental and creative activity as a pedagogical element for the technical knowledge of electric vehicles. The power train is developed in the Basque Country by Alterity, a company located in Baracaldo that manufactures lithium batteries for electro mobility and industrial machinery.

In this last phase of the competition, the electric vehicles will undergo dynamic and endurance tests on a circuit set up in front of the Bilbao Maritime Museum. This is the moment when the performance, characteristics and design of the vehicles are evaluated by means of slalom, acceleration and maximum braking tests, among others. However, prior to this phase, the participating students had to present their project reports and the vehicles were pre-tested.