PRINEVILLE — Four Crook County High School students huddled around the remote-control car they built, continuously tinkering with its parts. The group resembled a teenage pit crew , quickly passing screwdrivers and other tools among each other. They needed to remove a stuck screw.

Their car, which is about the size of a lunch box, is meant to run off a hydrogen-powered fuel cell, but the students hadn’t figured out how to make it work.

“We’re not going to break it, I hope,” said junior Ian Mansur, nervously .

“If you do, you’ll be able to fix it,” said the students’ teacher, Jason Mumm.

But that’s the whole point of the engineering technology STEM class at Crook County High School. The science, technology, engineering and math course is more than just teaching students how to build a small racing car, Mumm said. Building the car teaches the kids life skills, like problem-solving and teamwork, alongside their lessons in chemistry, electrical engineering and math.

“They’re skills that you would learn in a science or math class, but they’re doing it hands-on, building a car,” Mumm said. “I think that’s really cool.”

Although the students didn’t break their car that morning, they couldn’t get it to run off hydrogen either. But this small class still has more than a month until their hydrogen-powered car, nicknamed “The Mirage,” will face off against cars from more than 70 other high schools in California in April in an endurance test.

Earlier this year, Mumm was sent the kit for building the hydrogen-powered car from Horizon Educational, an educational company focused on STEM education.

Horizon sponsors an endurance race of student-built hydrogen race cars, dubbed the Horizon Grand Prix, in Brentwood, California, in the outer suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area. The goal of the race is to see how far each car can travel in six hours using hydrogen power, Mumm said.

When Horizon, and sponsoring partner Toyota Motor Corp., invited Crook County High School to be one of the first-ever Oregon schools to compete in the race, Mumm immediately signed on.

“We decided it was an opportunity that we couldn’t pass up,” he said.

Pacific Crest Middle School, in northwest Bend, will also be one of the select few schools outside California to compete at the Horizon Grand Prix on April 4.

When Mumm and his class received the car kit, all of the necessary parts were included — but not an instruction manual. So the class had to search online to find the proper techniques to assemble the vehicle.

“We don’t have any directions to this, so we have to do it by looking at videos, and applying what we see in the videos to building the cars,” Mumm said.

Kelci Hale, an 18-year-old senior, was motivated to join Mumm’s class because she’s fascinated by alternative fuel sources like hydrogen, she said.

“I thought it would be a really fun class to be in, and now we’re building the car I believed would be life-changing,” she said.

Fellow senior Hank Heiges, 17, said building the hydrogen-powered car has reaffirmed his love of engineering.

“I was already into it, but this kind of re-sparked my motivation to pursue it,” he said.

Aaron Robinson, a 17-year-old junior, was already interested in robotics and wiring, so building a remote-control car has been a fun experience, he said.

And even though Crook County High School’s car isn’t working yet, Robinson was confident in his team’s chances of outlasting the Californians in their April endurance race.

“I think we’re going to do a good job,” he said. “We’re the underdogs.”