The engineering class at Brighton High School has been given an assignment that’s not just an essay or a worksheet— instead, students have been tasked with creating and designing a creative solution to support both patients and caregivers at Compassionate Hospice Care.
Some people who have decided to take on this creative challenge, like senior Brady Scoggins, are not just doing this for a grade.
“I’m doing this project because I love helping the community, especially anyone who appreciates hard work put towards the well-being of themselves or the community,” Scoggins said.
The hospice center reached out to Brighton High School’s engineering department so that the students could play a role in designing new devices. The hospice center asked for many different things, from items that help with cognitive upkeep to different tools that assist both fine and gross motor skills.
“It would improve their ways of living under hospice care, giving them entertaining things to do and improving their motor skills on all levels,” Scoggins said.
Some students, including Scoggins and fellow seniors Andrew St. Clair, Erik Bowman and Aidan Duncan, have been working on a single project to assist the patients at Compassionate Hospice Care. In Duncan’s words, they are working to design “a spoon that will always face upwards for people in hospice that can actively move their whole arm/wrist.”
While St.Clair and Scoggins have been developing a smooth bearing to assist the rotation of their spoon holder, the final design will include a rotating bearing that keeps the spoon upright, allowing patients who may struggle with fine motor activities to be able to feed themselves without assistance.
This project is not the only thing the engineering class is working on for the hospice center, as they have requested a whole host of things, from larger puzzles, which senior Liam Plank is working to create, to a large tabletop mini golf game with clubs built so the patient won’t have to bend over.
With many engineering students currently making projects and many more to come in the future, the students are not only expanding their own technical skill sets but are directly interacting with the wider community and providing tangible benefits to those in need.
