INTRODUCING EPICS
Engineering Projects in Community Service
Our engineering class, LEAD (learning, engineering, and design) at Elizabeth Seton High School completes a community service project during your fourth year in the program. This EPICS project, built by a group called B7, focuses on helping the surrounding community by providing them with a system that allows citizens to give and take food and essential supplies as need be.
THE PROBLEM
A blessing box is a supply box used to share necessities to the community to help in their daily lives. There is a need for a blessing box to help the community be a better and thriving area. A blessing box is needed in this community because there are families that have to worry about providing food for themselves or their family so the blessing box would serve as an alternative to when they don’t have anything else to eat at home or don’t have enough money to buy anything. And for those who have a little extra can donate and help provide for their neighbors. Building a blessing box, where to build, how to build is the problem.
CONCLUSION
We agree that we liked completing the blessing box because it gave us insight into what we can do to help others in our community. As a whole we would have done differently the installation of the glass and cutting it. We would have tried to make sure that the plexiglass was cut more evenly and the caulk was applied in more sufficient places. And instead of using the hacksaw to cut the plexiglass, we would have used the circular saw since it would have been less time consuming and exhausting to complete the cut. We agreed that we didn’t have many shortcomings other than scheduling everything on the Gantt Chart, working with the plexiglass, and drilling into parts of the wood since it would begin to come apart.
After we decided to transfer our project into creating a blessing box from a kitchen cabinet instead of building it from scratch then we were able to avoid a lot of the hardships we could have encountered. We worked very well as a group especially since we were able to agree on dividing the responsibilities of the group into two groups of two. Something we would might have done done differently was do more research on the components of the weather conditions that blessing boxes will go through, completed more tests on the wood to see what would work best when drilling into it(because it started to come apart), and a more developed plan on how to complete certain tasks because there were a few days that we couldn’t do anything because we need to complete one part of the box before continuing to the next part.
"Light to know, Grace to do"
Elizabeth Ann Seton
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