Engineering II students in one of GCISD’s Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes, along with assistance from Grapevine High School’s Robotics Team, are working on a real life project for a good cause. They are building attachments to modify a ramp for GCISD Special Olympics student athletes to use in a first-ever bocce ball tournament with school resource officers, Board of Trustee members and the district’s leadership team, that will take place in April.
“The students were super excited,” said CTE teacher Anya McCarthy. “We immediately started to put our ideas on CAD [computer-aided design] to visually see what we wanted to do.”
GHS junior Trevor Bahlenhorst said that “instead of building an entire new ramp for cost reasons, we built an attachment to add to the bowling ramp that the Special Olympics students already had.”
He added that the attachment, which is made out of two PVC pipes and polycarbonate material, “easily slides into place and is easy to transport.”
Although it took the students only two weeks to design the two prototypes that they have ready, GHS senior Olivia Nevin also said that first, they were “going through the engineering design process and planning out through decision matrices what we wanted to do.”
McCarthy said that the project is teaching them collaboration, and much more.
“They are also using a lot of technical skills such as following the engineering design process, which is a constant cycle of making improvements to see what works and doesn’t work and continue to make another iteration,” she explained.
Those skills are exactly what engineering mentors from Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter who have visited the class have said is what they want to see in students.
“They’ve said that booksmarts are one thing, but the practical application is what they are looking for,” McCarthy continued. “In CTE, we focus on Career, College and Military Readiness. We want to give students skills that will be helpful not only in college, but in the workplace.”
It’s not just engineering skills students learn in the class.
“To think of something and be able to draw it up on a sketch and to watch it come to life in a bigger aspect, it definitely feels like an accomplishment,” Bahlenhorst stated.