Engineering Students hold “Build Day” for ADEC projects

Penn High School students spent seven hours, an entire school day, on May 15 building prototypes of tools that could help people with disabilities perform their jobs more efficiently and increase their pay. The “Build Day” is part of a larger ADEC Penn Innovation Challenge that was created to challenge engineering and robotics students to put their skills to use and give back to the community. Community mentors came in to help the STEM Academy engineering students. 

Penn partnered with ADEC to develop assistive technology devices that will help workers at ADEC Industries, a nonprofit company that provides packaging and assembly services while employing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

ADEC had a real-world problem for students to work on: How to save jobs and increase wages at ADEC Industries. Clients at other ADEC locations have already been selling products like dog biscuits and wooden signs, but the demand is too high to keep the products stocked on the shelves.

ADEC presented three categories for Penn students to focus on and find solutions for:
 

• BAKE: ADEC’s Bow Wow Dog Biscuits are the nonprofits most popular product, so they sell out faster than clients can produce them.
• BUILD: ADEC clients make and sell sturdy furniture like benches and chests, but it is a time-consuming process taking a lot of one-on-one work
• BALANCE: Custom wood signs are a top seller in ADEC’s art store, but the process of locking in the wood for the CNC machine is tidious and confusing for some.

Over the past several months, 77 teams of students have toured ADEC’s facilities, talked with clients and came up with possible solutions to these challenge areas.  After two days of presentations the week of April 27, the 77 teams were whittled down to 10 finalist teams.

Teams from Mishawaka High School also presented alongside Penn students. Ultimately, one team from Mishawaka and nine from Penn were chosen as finalists to build their prototype. The team from Mishawaka worked on their prototype at Mishawaka High School.
 

The Teams had their entire school day to work on the prototypes of the designs. Next up for the students, on Monday, May 22, the students will pitch and present their prototypes to a panel of judges at ADEC offices in Elkhart.

From those final presentations on May 22, ADEC will choose one winning team. The students of the winning team will be offered paid internships this summer to work on their projects. Sibley Machine, one of Penn’s Community Partners, will host the students and pay for their internships.