High School Students Build Car Fueled By Twitter, Facebook And Other Social Media (VIDEO)

Teens Build Car Fueled By Social Media (VIDEO)

A group of high schoolers from Kansas City, Mo. are about to embark on a very special road trip, using a car fueled entirely by social media. (Yes, you heard that right.)

According to WKMG Local 6, teens involved in an after-school program called Minddrive -- a non-profit that inspires at-risk teens by focusing on electric car design -- took a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia from 1967 and made it into a car of the future.

After students restored the car and converted it to electric, Wired reports they used an Arduino -- a microcontroller device that makes it easier to program and automate interactive projects -- on the electric drivetrain of the car.

Learn more about their "social media car" in the the video above.

This allowed students to program the vehicle to their specific needs, and in this case, they engineered the car to be powered by social media interactions like hashtagging #MindDrive on Twitter and Instagram, liking their Facebook page and watching the video on YouTube. The car has essentially been programmed to move forward when this device recognizes any of these social media connections.

Now that they're done building the vehicle, the students are planning on testing out the car themselves by road tripping to Washington, D.C., and relying on social fuel to get there.

Once they arrive in D.C., students will meet with elected officials and hold a press conference to raise awareness about the benefits of this innovative kind of education.

"Now, I decided I want to be an engineer," one student explained in the video. "This opens a lot of doors for my future."

When it comes to cars and technology, teens have been making especially groundbreaking discoveries recently. Ionut Budisteanu, a 19-year-old student from Romania, won first place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair on May 17 for inventing a self-driving car that is much less expensive than other existing models. The teen used artificial intelligence as a way to decrease self-driving car's technology cost.

"This is the purpose of mankind," Ionut said. "To create some inventions and to create some projects in order to help the entire population and the entire world."

Eesha Khare, an 18-year-old student from California, was also a finalist at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for creating a device that can charge a cell phone between 20 and 30 seconds.

The teen explained that since her phone battery always dies, so she wanted to invent a supercapacitor that acts as a energy storage device and can hold a great amount energy in a small amount of space. Eesha is using her $50,000 prize from the science fair toward her education at Harvard in the fall.

“I will be setting the world on fire,” she told CBS San Francisco.

Do these teens inspire you? Tell us in the comments or tweet at @HuffPostTeen.

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