LYNN — Students at Thurgood Marshall Middle School participated in a class, in partnership with MassHire and Spark Photonics in Waltham, where they learned about manufacturing and engineering.
This class was one of five major classes offered to eighth-grade students and began on March 14, featuring field trips to Innovent in Peabody and the new Lynn Vocational Technical Institute’s machine shop, as well as some classes hosted by Spark Photonics specialists themselves.
Program Specialist for Data and Assessment at Marshall, Kim McFarlane, said the whole idea of this class is to expose eighth-grade students, or middle-school students in general, to manufacturing and engineering, and to show them some of the pathways.
“It’s been kind of an overall endeavor to get them to identify a problem; a local or world problem, to come up with some solutions, to do some research on why it is a problem and get some data,” McFarlane said.
The students spent the past couple of months split into four groups working on four different project topics that they came up with. They presented these topics on Tuesday morning in front of a panel of judges, including Superintendent of Schools Dr. Patrick Tutwiler, in a shark-tank-like event.
As part of the project, the students sketched a model of their devices to help with whatever issue they addressed, and Spark Photonics used its 3-D printer to print these devices for the presentation.
The judges chose the littering team as the winners. The other three teams did projects on a school-security device, a GPS-tracking device, and a pet scanner for detecting illnesses in pets.
“It’s really nice,” said McFarlane. “They did a pretty good job.”
This is the first year that Marshall is offering this class and the first time that this program has been done at the middle-school level.
Spark Photonics has hosted this partnership at some colleges and high schools, but has never done it at a middle school.
“It was a nice opportunity and all because a lot of students at the middle-school level have no idea what it means even to go to a vocational high school,” McFarlane said. “Just to give them the understanding of what manufacturing is and what opportunities are out there in engineering is great.”
