Howard County Students Earn Top Honors For Developing Safety Solutions

HOWARD COUNTY, MD — Two Howard High School teams took home top honors for developing innovative solutions to real-world problems at the annual Project Lead the Way Engineering Design & Development Expo. A team from Marriotts Ridge High School placed third for developing a fire safety device.

The expo brought together teams from high schools across Howard County to showcase projects developed during their participation in HCPSS’ Gifted and Talented PLTW Engineering Design and Development class, a year-long course in which seniors research, design and build solutions to authentic engineering problems.

Under the guidance of HoHS PTLW instructor Jay Morraye, the Howard High School teams began the school year by identifying and validating the problem they wanted to solve.

“That part of the process was really time consuming,” said student Issac Sherwood, whose team placed second in this year’s expo. “We came up with a lot of possible problems. And even once we narrowed down what we wanted to do, we had to do a lot of research to confirm that the problem we had in mind was something we should try to solve.”

The first place team—comprised of Michael Jenkins, Benjamin Ward and Kyle Jones—developed a device that would enable people suffering from arthritis, carpal tunnel and other motor skill-related issues to more easily pump gasoline into their cars.

The second-place team, including Sherwood and his fellow HoHS students Bryson Bartlett and Samantha Barnhart, developed a device that would help to prevent children from tampering with electrical outlets.

Read more at: https://news.hcpss.org/news-po...