After discovering that a 15-year-old student had a defective hand, a high school teacher in Tennessee, USA, assigned a special project to his classmates: Build a robotic hand.
According to BBC, the story took place at Hendersonville High School in Tennessee, USA. The 15-year-old student Sergio Peralta began attending a specialized engineering class taught by Jeff Wilkins, titled: Engineering: Design and Development.
The teenager always tried to hide his hand, which was malformed due to a congenital defect. However, a teacher discovered this little secret and decided to assign Peralta’s classmates a special project: Build a hand for your friend.
Sergio Peralta’s robotic hand created by his classmates – (Photo: WTVF).
The assignment quickly sparked enthusiastic participation from the engineering students. It also met the class’s goal of turning theoretical concepts into real-world projects.
Leslie Jaramillo, a classmate of Peralta, told WTVF, a local CBS affiliate: “You have to be an engineer, come up with new ideas, solve problems, and make things better than before.”
Sergio Peralta joyfully recounted to CBS: “In the end, they suggested to me, ‘We can make a prosthetic hand for you.’ I never expected that. Never in a million years.”
Previously, he was born with an incomplete right hand and had gotten used to it. He wrote with his left hand and could do almost everything else.
Bob Cotter, the principal of Hendersonville High School, told BBC: “Sergio’s robotic hand is evidence that our students care for each other and are engaged in the program that Jeff Wilkins (a technology entrepreneur in the USA) has built.”
Jeff Wilkins’s class spent four weeks designing, 3D printing, and sizing the prototype for Peralta’s hand. After a month of work, they asked him to try out a game of tag, a hobby that had previously been out of reach for him. Peralta stated that the hand had “changed his life.”
