By Michael Ganci, Syntax for the Bronxville School

Dec. 23, 2020: The Bronxville School has unveiled its new Design and Innovation Center, which serves as a learning space for robotics, design and printing, and various innovative student projects. Funded through a generous grant from the Bronxville School Foundation, the space features a center area with high tables where students can do collaborative work together, as well as work and manufacturing stations.

“The Design and Innovation Center is a dedicated space for students to explore and create projects, which they don’t necessarily get access to anywhere else in their high school experiences,” physics teacher Ben Cornish said. “We can facilitate open-ended projects, using rapid prototyping tools and materials. Students can design, build and test out their ideas and solutions to problems.”

In Cornish’s robotics class, a group of students built a robot, using the VEX platform, which navigates the hallways autonomously and detects whether or not a person is wearing a mask through an algorithm running on an iPad. In Kevin Geidel’s entrepreneurship class, students worked to rapidly prototype innovations that could be brought to market. One student designed a foot stop for a door to be opened with a foot instead of a hand to help with concerns around COVID-19.

“As a teacher, you always want to find ways to get the students to do this kind of work, and I’m so grateful and excited to be in this beautiful fabrication room where students can really have whatever they need to make the visions in their heads come to life,” Geidel said.

Click here to watch a video on the new space.

Pictured: Bronxville High School students working in the new Design and Innovation Center.

Photos courtesy of the Bronxville Union Free School District