In the Classroom

Engineering Design and Development (EDD) is the capstone course of the Engineering Pathway here at Hebron Academy. Designed by Project Lead the Way, EDD is an open-ended engineering research course in which students work in teams to design and develop an original solution to a well-defined and justified open-ended problem by applying an engineering design process.

Students perform research to select, define, and justify a problem. After carefully defining the design requirements and creating multiple solution approaches, teams of students select an approach, create, and test their solution prototype. The course culminates at the end of the year with teams presenting their original solution to an outside panel. While progressing through the engineering design process, students will work closely with experts and will continually hone their organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills, their creative and problem-solving abilities, and their understanding of the design process.

 

One group of EDD students Max, Forest, and Jakub, shared their capstone project idea:

In our engineering class, we have the opportunity to design and develop different projects throughout the year. After dividing ourselves into three groups, we began to brainstorm potential projects to work on for the rest of the year. Our group decided to focus on the traveling aspect of society. Although at first we wanted to focus on climate change and air pollution-related issues; we changed our minds after coming to the conclusion that the issues we were trying to solve were much too broad to approach in the context of the class. We were stagnant for about a week, but then we began thinking about upgrading already made solutions. After asking 100 people in our school, we discovered common complaints among the population regarding suitcases and travel. Sending out the survey helped us to understand the qualities of suitcases that can be improved upon. 

Day-to-day we worked on research and designs. Starting the week of January 23, 2023, we are creating a prototype that will be used to address what was done correctly and what can be improved upon. Our prototype will be constructed out of quality cardboard. We have designed wheels, specialized storage compartments, and components for charging cells along with GPS tracking. We are looking to address many of the issues we found when gathering data, as well as keeping user experience in the forefront of our minds. We hope to be able to create a suitcase that will be able to be a viable and marketable product.

Stay tuned for updates on the capstone projects!