More than 100 years after the creation of the airplane, Elon Musk is trying to revolutionize the next major form of transportation and is calling for help from students across the country.

The concept of the Hyperloop was first proposed by Musk, the co-founder of Tesla Motors and founder of SpaceX, in 2013. The Hyperloop is a high-speed transportation concept which would be able to move up to 700 miles per hour, and would work through a compressed air system.

The Hyperloop Pod Competition Design Weekend was created to allow students to help develop the pods for the Hyperloop, and was held at Texas A&M University in January. Team EAL and Team Whip, made up of Binghamton University students, were two of the 120 teams selected for the competition.

Though a team of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the competition, the BU teams said they plan on returning to the competition again next year. They are looking into creating an upper-level elective course to be offered at BU in advanced transportation technology, so that students can continue to work on the creation of a Hyperloop pod for years to come.

The teams were composed of mechanical, electrical, industrial and systems and computer engineers from the Watson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The teams were originally students working on their senior design, and both submitted proposals for the Hyperloop competition. Tyler Mehlman, a member of team WHIP and a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, said that the competition came to mind when a class pushed them to get more involved.

“In the first week of senior design, our professor was talking about how we needed more mechanical engineering projects, and I thought back to that link my dad had sent me,” Mehlman said. “My co-captain Noah and I then wrote up a proposal and our project was started.”

The Design Weekend at the competition consisted of hours of developing and presenting each teams’ Pod design, and of remarks from noteworthy speakers such as astronaut Greg Chamitoff and Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. According to Lauren Maietti, a member of team WHIP and a senior majoring in electrical engineering, the best part was networking with engineers, all from different, noteworthy companies.

“We got to hang out with SpaceX engineers, Tesla engineers, NASA engineers and even Steve Davis, the director of SpaceX,” Maietti said. “It was priceless networking and priceless knowledge. It was cool to see the many different perspectives each team took towards their Hyperloop designs.”

Kirill Zaychik, the adviser for both teams and a mechanical engineering professor, said that he was at first reluctant to work with the students, but was impressed with their devotion.

“The passion and drive that the students have is overwhelming; they were eager to work day-in and day-out,” Zaychik said. “Within three months they put this project together, submitted it for design review, passed and kept working until they finally went to Texas.”

According to Matthew Jones, a member of team WHIP and a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, they had to start from scratch while at the competition, since very little research has been done on the concept overall.

“It was at a point where it was so overwhelming that we kind of just broke it down as best as we could, divided it into subsystems,” Jones said. “There is no research on it, so it is a total learning experience. You just need pick where you want to go and figure it out on your own.”