MHS Students Design Bike for Disabled Man

[Editor's note: The following was submitted by Malden High School.]

Four Malden High School students, accompanied by their teacher Chris Bazzinotti, participated in the Assistive Technology Design Fair May 14 at UMass Lowell. The students, under Bazzinotti’s supervision, designed a motorized three-wheel bike for a disabled 87-year-old man. The man’s desire is to be able to use the bike to make his way around Castle Island.

The fair is an engineering service-learning project that challenges teams of high school students to find and solve real-world design problems involving assistive technology. Each team must find an elderly, disabled or special-needs person in their community, and identify a problem that they have which can be solved using technology—this person becomes their client.

Students research, brainstorm, explore, and evaluate possible design solutions, and ultimately build a working prototype of their solution to present at the Design Fair. The judges chose five teams out of about forty to present their projects. The Malden High School team won two tool boxes full of tools.