LEBANON — Matt Knudson walked behind the life-size, remote-controlled ATV, guiding it up over a curb in the Lebanon High School parking lot as a crowd of high school students watched with envy.

The desert vehicle responded to each command from the little black box that Knudson carried in his hands.

“These vehicles are actually designed to operate for up to 175 miles in the desert without any human controls,” Knudson told the students. “This one doesn’t do it but we’ve got a new one in the works.”

The desert vehicle was one of several class projects that OSU engineering students brought to the high school Thursday to show students in the physical systems academy.

The remote-controlled vehicle was built by the Willamette Autonomous Vehicles Enterprise, a group of OSU graduate students and professors, for a competition sponsored by the Pentagon to create an autonomous vehicle capable of traversing long distances in the desert.

The engineering day at the high school was put on to give the physical systems academy students some ideas of what they can do with their skills after they graduate.

“This just lets our kids see some different perspectives of what we’re trying to do here,” physical systems principal Ken Ray said.

Steve Adams, a former LHS teacher who now works in the OSU Mechanical Engineering Department, said the job market is changing — some jobs, like welding, have been replaced by automated machines.

“We’re trying to slowly change this academy from a vocational to an engineering-based program to give students better job opportunities,” he said.

OSU students who recently took first place in the country for the creation of their Baja car said they have already received job offers from Honda, Polaris and others.

Lee Miltenberger, an undergrad at OSU, praised the Baja car project for the hands-on experience it gave the students.

“The idea is you’re designing and building a prototype vehicle to sell to investors,” Miltenberger said.

The OSU team’s vehicle recently won first place in Wisconsin competing against 140 universities from Brazil, Korea, South Africa and around the United States.

The Baja car was designed and built each step of the way by students, and judged on a variety of characteristics, like weight, power and endurance.

“We get a lot of kids in the program that are very book smart but I ask them to hand me a socket wrench and they don’t know what I mean,” Adams said. “This project teaches the kids practical applications.”

“One of the main points is also for students to learn to work together as a team,” said Bob Paasch, OSU professor of mechanical engineering.

Other projects on display included the Beaver Racing team’s racecar that goes 0 to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds, and a project designed to test welding in a weightless environment, which the OSU Nasa Consortium club hopes to carry out at NASA facilities in Houston this summer.

Patrick Lair can be reached at patrick.lair@lee.net or 258-6441.