Students in Ms. Kim’s class have been working on an engineering design challenge this spring related to their theme for the year, “What Makes us Human?” In teams, they designed prosthetic legs. See their creations, and reflections on the process in the videos below, and enjoy one student’s blog post about the unit:
Prosthetic Legs
by Grace Liu
Over the last few months, we made prosthetic legs. We made the prosthetic legs out of things we could find in the innovation lab and could ask Ms. Kim for other materials if we needed them for the leg to work. The point of this project was to design and learn the physics of prosthetic legs. We learned about the joints in the leg and how they work along with Newton’s laws, torque, weight, friction, etc.. We first did a design process, which is designing and building our first design, then we tested them by actually walking with them. During each round it was pretty frustrating since they didn’t really work and several of the testers thought testing it hurt but on other hand we all did enjoy building the legs. Though all of them barely worked the first round, by the final process they worked pretty well considering the time we had to revise it.
