TMS students learn engineering through building, riding bikes

At around 2:30 p.m. on April 23, some members of the afterschool mountain bike club were riding the trails behind Talawanda Middle School (TMS) or practicing changing their gears to push uphill or glide down, while another was practicing angling their bike around a set of cones to keep control.

Jaxson Baker, 12, a seventh grader, said he joined the club in September 2025 when it first started.

“I wanted to test new sports and things to see if I wanted to get a new hobby,” Jaxson said. “This is really fun, actually.”

Jaxson said he lives near a wooded area that he often bikes through. But since joining the club, he’s learned how to change his own tires and about how his bike actually works. His endurance has also improved.

“I feel like (the club) has made me stronger and really better at biking,” Baker said, adding he and his friends will sometimes compete to see who can complete the trail the fastest. “It’s a fun experience.”

Scott Dennis, a history of engineering teacher at TMS, is using local grant funding to teach students like Jaxson how to build and ride mountain bikes with the help of a local bike shop manager.

Throughout the year, Dennis teaches his students about feats in engineering through hands-on learning projects in his shop. This year, as his class approached the late 1800s and early 1900s and the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, his students had the opportunity to learn how to build and maintain actual bicycles that would later be ridden by Dennis’ afterschool mountain bike club.

Dennis got the idea to start the club from a conversation he had with a maintenance worker, Jon Oberschlake, after school hours. Dennis had an unused space in his shop and the large grass space behind the school has plenty of humps to ride over.

As part of Phase V of the Oxford Trails System, the city is also working on connecting TMS and Talawanda High School via a path, which could create a new riding opportunity.

Dennis took the idea to the schools’ health and wellness coordinator and eventually applied for a community grant, which the school received from the McCullough Hyde Foundation in 2025 for $12,500. About $9,000 of these funds were used to purchase the parts for 11 bikes from BikeWise, as well as a work bench, spare tires, grease, cables, bike helmets, shirts and other gear.

Since June 2025, with the help of BikeWise store manager Chris Goff, Dennis has had more than 15 students between fall 2025 and spring 2026 learn how to ride and maintain mountain bikes. Goff said the store used some online training options through Trek Bikes to teach the students. 

With the help of Oberschlake, hooks were hung in his shop to store the bikes, and the trails around the school have been kept.

During the fall, students in Dennis’ class did the bulk of the work in building the bikes. After school hours – or sometimes during study hall – the mountain bike club takes over, maintaining and riding the bikes.

“I think it’s good for them to use their hands to learn a skill,” Dennis said, adding the students who practice biking will complete a lap of at least one mile on the TMS property. “It’s a pretty cool thing to do. People have liked riding for the last 100 years.”

Goff said, when he stepped in, most of the students already knew how to ride a bike. Instead, he’s been teaching them after school how to “handle” it through a mountain-riding perspective, working on the use of gear ratios and focusing on intense cornering and control.

The students are also learning how to change their own tires, adjust their gears and check their brakes, among other safety skills.

“I think they’re handling skills and then actually becoming mechanically sound on what’s going on,” Goff said. “They can ride their bikes ’til they’re 90, and so it’s a skill they can use the rest of their life, and hopefully intensely.”

Beyond exercising and participating in an afterschool activity, Goff said he thinks Dennis’ program is “great.”

Goff is an on-and-off coach with the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA). Through NICA, students can travel to mountain-bike competitively against other teams.

Goff said he already has some funding, and there already exists a race that passes through Hueston Woods State Park, as well as in a few other nearby places between August and September. The entry fee, he said, is $75 per student for fifth grade through high schoolers. 

A couple of Talawanda students have already shown an interest in forming a team outside of the school, and a team of students from a school in Lebanon has expressed wanting to merge to increase their numbers. 

Now, due to the number of interested students, all Goff would need to form a team and participate in NICA tournaments is a second coach.