Engineering Explorations
Engineering Explorations is the open door into our high school engineering pathway. Students sample the full landscape of the profession - mechanical, civil, electrical, biomedical, software, and more - while practicing one repeatable habit: a structured way of turning a fuzzy problem into a tested solution. Every few weeks brings a new challenge drawn from the students' own community, so the work always has a face and a stake attached to it.
The course keeps the barrier to building deliberately low. Cardboard, foam, hot glue, and simple pocket-sized microcontrollers stand in for industrial tools, which means ideas get built, measured, and rebuilt fast. Along the way students learn to gather real data, graph it honestly, and let the numbers - not the loudest voice - decide what the team does next.
The year closes with a smart, sustainable community challenge: teams identify a local need, interview the people who live with it, and deliver a working sensor-driven prototype alongside a public presentation. Students leave knowing which branches of engineering pull at them - and with the confidence that they already think like engineers.
View the full lesson plan — all 180 periods →
Course structure — 6 units, 6 weeks each
In every unit, weeks 1–5 build the skills and week 6 applies them in a project, with a deliverable due at the end of each day.