A robotic prosthetic hand, and other hacks these high schoolers built

Most high school students have never taken a technical entrepreneurship class. Steve Compton wants to change that.

After teaching high school chemistry for 30 years, Compton is piloting the first ever Design Engineering class at Westtown School, a private school in West Chester where high schoolers can pitch a technical project and then go out and make it.

Students work in groups to identify a community need or market opportunity (hopefully both) and design a product that their target consumers would find useful. The class gives kids a chance to be creators, said Compton, and expose them to a level of design thinking not usually taught in the classroom.

“They work like really small startups,” said Compton.

Steve Compton teaches his students in the design and engineering lab of Westtown School’s recently completed Science Center. Photo courtesy of Westtown.

He hopes to leverage community and university relations in the future to get his students access to state-of-the-art 3D printing technologies (like many other local schools).

One in four Westtown graduates go on to major in STEM subjects in college — the U.S. average is one in ten, a school spokeswoman said.

The robotic prosthetic hand that Westtown students are building with a 3D printer.

Here are three of the coolest projects happening in Compton’s Design Engineering class:

• A robotic prosthetic hand. Using a 3D printer and imaging software, this student group is designing a fully functional prosthetic replacement for a seven-year-old boy who was born without a hand. They meet with him and his mother regularly to try out new iterations of the design.
• A submarine water-testing device. This robotic submarine will help the school clean up their campus pond, with has been infested with geese for years. The kids are also planning to add a life-sized cut-out of a dog on top the submarine, so that the figurine will float along the surface of the pond and scare away geese.
• “Tricked-out” walkers. Part-Segway, part-stairstepper, these walkers are designed based off suggestions from residents at a senior citizen living center. The students want to create an alternative to the “terrible” walkers that residents have had to used, and are also consulting physical therapists to evolve their designs.

Photo courtesy of Westtown.