Thank you all for your encouragement and suggestions.

My vision is a car that can be raced using the regular RC control on a circuit defined in the basketball court of the middle school gym but then the track leads underneath the fold down bleacher seats. The student running the RC can not see under the stands. Remember that under there on the floor are many supporting structures. The car must avoid these on its own.

A different vision is to have the same track on the gym floor, but including a maze made from, say, cardboard boxes that the car must navigate. We could put Xmas tree lights over each of the exit holes in the boxes. In autonomous mode the car could sense the lights.

RC cars have beautiful model suspensions. They go very fast and are quite indestructible. From the point of view of developing STEM thinking they are missing a formal language and repeatable controls. I are trying to marry the two.

Ken