Grades: 11, 12

Credits: SHS: 1 per semester (2 total yearly)

College: Possible to earn 3 credits towards an engineering degree at over 70 colleges

Prerequisite: Need to have taken a minimum of two other PLTW courses

Fees: A lab fee may be assessed to cover the cost of extra materials

 

“Don’t you hate it when…” is a common statement made by people who are constantly thinking of ways to improve products or situations. Engineering Design and Development (EDD) is the course that allows you to design a solution to a technical problem of your choosing. Now is your chance to eliminate one of the “Don’t you hate it when…” statements of the world. This course is an engineering course in which you will work in teams to research, design, and construct a solution to an open-ended engineering problem. You and your team will present and defend your solution to a panel of outside reviewers at the end of the school year.

 

Engineering Design and Development serves as the capstone course within the Project Lead The Way course sequence and allows you to apply all the skills and knowledge learned in the previous Project Lead the Way courses that you have taken, a minimum of two, during your high school career. Inventor, which is a state of the art 3-D design software package from AutoDesk, will help you design solutions to the problem you and your team have

The students worked hard all year long on one project of their choosing, the following pictures depict the final piece of their success. The presentation in which they showed off their hard work, and let the community and fellow students ask questions about their work.  

 

The students below were part of the Capstone PLTW course last year Engineering Design and Development. Their task for the whole year was to go through the design process, and create a prototype to a problem that they discovered. This class is completely designed to be student lead, they did all of the research, found stake holders, created prototypes, tested prototypes, and presented their findings.

 

These students entered their portfolio in The St. Cloud State competition and the end of last school year (2014-15) and were notified that they won! This included a secondary company going through their design and recreating their product according to their portfolio. The students received an award along with $1000.00 each for their education. I would like to congratulate Ankitha Varadhan, Jacob Pauly, and Michael Strawer for winning this award for their "Baby Seat Alarm System."
 

 

The following video was done by one of the groups during the 2014-2015 school year. The students were asked to come up with a problem, work on that problem all year long, and use the design process to solve that problem. The group created prototypes, and tested their solution against design criteria they came up with.

 

This group had designed a mouth guard that was able to sync to a laptop, to help people who had limited motor functions with their hands. The mouth guard was to act in place of a mouse would on your computer.