High school students create car powered by social media



(CNN) -- Technology has brought an old clunker to new life! It's a car driven (literally) by social media!

High school students from Kansas City, Missouri turned an old-school Volkswagen Karmann Gia into an electric car -- powered by tweets, Facebook "likes" and Instagram shares -- making it cruise like it never could back in 1967.

The car is run on social fuel. A tweet sends a signal into a box in the car that lets the car know it has social fuel and can begin running.

"Social media being used to power a car that they built is just so perfect," Linda Buchner, President of Minddrive said.

Every tweet, Facebook "like" and Instagram share gets routed through a server. If there isn't enough social media buzz, the black box can cut power to the electric engine.

"It's designed so that when we stop for charging, if we don't have enough social fuel the car won't start again, but it's not going to leave us stranded on the side of the highway," Minddrive student Cornel Foster said.

That's a good thing, because kids and mentors from the Minddrive Program are preparing to drive their creation from Kansas City to Washington, D.C., where they will lobby lawmakers for hands-on education.

"I got to move around, do stuff, so I wasn't sitting at a desk for an hour, having a teachers just go up here and show you. We actually got to get our hands dirty," Minddrive student Kelvin Duley said.

Minddrive started as an after school program working on cars at one high school and quickly grew to draw in kids from several inner-city schools.

"We're trying to provide a hook, a way to ignite their interest that they each have inside of them," Buchner said.

"It gave me some motivation I would think. I had a set goal of being a professional athlete at first, not really caring about honestly my degree or anything like that but I guess, this car has changed my perspective about how much a degree or education matters," Duley said.