A time-lapse video of Garfield-Palouse High School students, with support from Washington State University, building an award-winning lift to heft farmers with disabilities into combines.
“Sean Neal is good at math, but one bit of geometry he can’t master involves moving ten feet up and two feet over. The wheelchair-bound teen isn’t able to climb into a combine to help harvest his family’s wheat fields.
While Neal’s dad was carrying him up a ladder and helping him into the operator’s seat, his math teacher at Garfield-Palouse High School was pondering ways to nudge students toward careers in which they could use their number-crunching skills. Jim Stewart thought an engineering design contest might do the trick. A former baseball coach, Stewart knows kids like to compete. Sure enough, his Gar-Pal design team knocked it out of the park. Their Paraplegic Agricultural Lift (PAL), inspired by the Neal family’s dilemma, won second place in a national competition.”
Read “Elevating engineering in the schools,” Washington State Magazine, Fall 2009, by Julie Titone.