Students in the Engineering Design and Development course at Hendersonville High School in Tennessee did not have to look far for a way to put what they were learning to use in the real world.
The students developed and produced a prosthetic hand for sophomore Sergio Peraota.
Reporter Claire Kopsky of NewsChannel5 in Nashville told the story in a video that has been posted on YouTube.
“I never expected this,” Peraota says. “Living without a hand for 15 years and they actually offered me to is actually pretty cool. No one has ever offered me this stuff.
“It changed my life.”
Peraota and the other students did not know each other before being introduced by the teacher. Peraota was not enrolled in the course.
The project took four weeks of design, 3D printing, and fitting.
“We were kind of starting from scratch, but we were able to look at some previous designs from offline,” says one of the designers, Leslie Jaramiooo. “And once we started with the idea it went off from there.”
A congenital amputee, Peraota had adapted to living with a right hand that never fully formed. He said he could do “almost everything” with his left hand, but in the video he is clearly delighted with his prosthesis.
“I had a lot of people ask me what happened to my hand,” he says. “Lots of people. I used to just say, even in kindergarten, I used to say, ‘I was born like that.’”