Odds and endsHigh school students offer engineering solutions to everyday challenges

There is hope for America. Teacher Sharon Tomski’s design class at Saint Thomas More High School likes to solve everyday problems using engineering technology. The class is one component of the school’s Project Lead the Way program, a national curriculum that offers mathematics, science, engineering, and technology education courses to middle and high schools.

“It’s not just teaching passively, but teaching actively,” said Bob Pauly, president of Saint Thomas More, a Catholic college preparatory high school on Milwaukee’s south side

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Katelyn Ferral writes that the school’s pre-engineering program is in its sixth year and thriving, with many students creating potentially patent-worthy inventions. Here are some o f the inventions by students at the class:

• Luggage that weighs itself internally as its being packed. The students used parts from a bathroom scale and installed monitors on the side of the suitcase to alert the traveler when the bag is too heavy.


• A weed-whacking attachment that can connect to any lawn mower, and which allows for cutting and trimming the lawn at the same time


• Former Saint Thomas More student Chantel Newman came up with the idea for her invention from her mother who had difficulty standing up and sitting down after two hip replacement surgeries. “Walkers kind of solve that problem,” Newman said, “but then you have the walkers and the crutches, it’s just a whole lot of equipment and hard to move around. So my idea was to combine the two, crutches and a walker.” Newman, now a freshman engineering student at Marquette University, won a scholarship from the university for her crutch-walker hybrid invention last year. She said she is in the process of pursuing a patent.

Patent attorney Joe Heino of the law firm Davis & Kuelthau said more students have approached him about patenting their work. He said he has “seen more students in the last few years simply because of the quality of the high school programs out there, Saint Thomas More being one of them.”

Ferral writes that creating the connections between students and industry professionals is a major tenet of Project Lead The Way engineering programs. Student teams are matched with mentors like Jerrold Martocci, an engineer in wireless technologies at Johnson Controls, to help with their designs.

“From a design standpoint, high school kids haven’t had the exposure to all the technologies in that domain … they’re limited and in that regard, I can help them out a lot,” Martocci said.

Even if students choose not to pursue a technical field, they learn problem-solving and perseverance that will be valuable in any career, Tomski said. “This is an elective that teaches you time management and communication skills … that kind of stuff is good no matter what you do, and it’s nice to have those soft skills that employers look for,” she said.