OLATHE, Kan. — Students in the Olathe School District's 21st Century Academies biological engineering class are fast-tracking careers in the field with hands-on experience.
"It's kind of like declaring your major before you go to college," Olathe South teacher Kristin Ramshaw, a facilitator for the school's bio engineering class, said.
Freshman in the Olathe district can sign up for a 21st Century Academy program, some of which are only at designated schools. The programs, which range from communications to computer science to the engineering class, are built around a hyper-specific curriculum for students interested in those fields.
A recent visitor to the bio engineering class, a person missing a limb, inspired the group's current project.
"She actually talked about some of the more difficult things that she had (to deal) with having only one arm," Olathe South freshman Wyatt Vaughn said.
Her challenges spurred the students to create gadgets, which might help.
"Another one we started thinking about is jump rope," Vaughn said. "That's the one our group is focusing on. How would you exactly jump rope?"
Other members in the Falcons' freshman class are working on a gadget that could help the amputee open a water bottle, because the visitor told them the caps can be difficult to open.
But it doesn't stop there.
For the seniors in this class, they are using The Optitrack to study repetitive-use injuries in orchestra students.
"We decided that we wanted test common wrist injuries in orchestra players specially violin and viola," Olathe South senior Faith Bestgen said. "We wanted to see how they got the injury, (a) common injury is tendonitis."
They are currently testing musicians by having them play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in front of a motion-capture system.
"We really would like to design a brace for it on our 3D printer that we have or a sleeve or something," Bestgen said. "There is not much out there on this."
These students are grateful for the chance to try something new and possibility make a career out of what they learned.
"We are not just coming in here and learning just about bio engineers, because bio engineers do so many things and there are so many jobs you can get from being a bio engineer," Bestgen said.
Ramshaw said she is truly proud of her students, especially because their main focus is to help someone.
"Really, it's just to help people," Bestgen said. "How can we help somebody have maybe not a better life, but a little bit easier time doing daily tasks?"
