News Photo by Julie Goldberg Alpena High School senior Tyler Smigelski presents his engineering 3 class project at the high school on Tuesday in front of other students and local engineering professionals.

ALPENA — On Tuesday, students at Alpena High School presented their engineering 3 class projects in front of other students and those locally in the engineering profession.

Seniors Brendan Lee, Chris Natzel, Tyler Smigelski, Bennett Speaks, Kyle Smith, and junior Elizabeth Belanger presented projects that teacher Elly Diamond assigned to them six weeks ago.

“For engineering, I am trying to find projects that are relevant to their everyday use and that they could complete in a six week period,” Diamond said. “I found teachers in the building that had some sort of optics because my focus was customer relations.”

The teachers were the clients for the students’ projects. Diamond said she wanted the project to be relevant to their client so the students can focus on customer service. The students also came up with a design process.

“Those are the pieces that I was trying to work with and I just blindly stumbled into the idea that we could use cell phones and a piece of optics for the project,” Diamond said.

The students began their project with a problem statement and after developing the problem statement, they had to build a first prototype. After building that first prototype, the groups would have to meet with the clients. The groups had to build another prototype after receiving feedback from their client before submitting their final prototype.

After the groups presented their projects in front of other students and engineering professionals, they got feedback from the engineering professionals on their final prototype and what they learned while completing the project.

“It’s a step in the doorway towards our future,” Natzel said of the project and class. “It’s a great class and an opportunity to learn from many great people.”

During his presentation, Natzel said he learned a lot throughout the design process, especially when having to interact with a client.

Even though the students were seperated into groups of two, they all worked together by bouncing ideas off of each other and talking about the prototypes they were building.

“You have to learn how to problem solve when doing the design process,” Lee said. “This class is fun too because even though we do take notes sometimes, we also get to complete projects.”

Belanger said they learned how to complete their prototypes on time and they learned how to communicate better by having to talk with a client about the prototype they were building for the client.

The students have all been in Diamond’s engineering classes for three years with the engineering 3 course being their capstone course.

“They’ve come a long way this year and it’s super fun to watch,” Diamond said. “I thought all the groups had great presentations.”

Diamond also had the students create a resume, which will help them prepare for interviews, internships, or getting an after-school job that might be in a typical place like a fast food restaurant.

The engineering 3 course is a yearlong course and Diamond said the students will next focus on the marketing aspect of engineering.

“We will figure out how we look at the marketing aspect and then we will probably do one or two more projects depending on how the year goes,” Diamond said. “We’ll do projects where they will go from concept to prototype.”

Julie Goldberg can be reached via email at jgoldberg@thealpenanews.com or by phone at 358-5688.