In the engineering lab, Benilde-St. Margaret’s students learn what it takes to be inventors. With a program that offers four years’ worth of engineering-based classes, students start their journey working with Legos, building their way to their independent projects as upperclassmen. This summer, engineering teacher Charles Nepomuceno has made some changes to the versatile lab space.

According to senior Maggie Hewitt, an engineering student since freshman year, the changes have made the space less cluttered, with the addition of extra storage space beneath the tables for lab tools and student supplies. Additionally, wheeled chairs and flexible workspaces add to the collaborative environment of the engineering lab. “I feel like it makes it easier to work with other people, because before… you could have a couple people on one side but you [couldn’t] see across [the table] well,” Hewitt said. 

Replacing bulky tables with flexible workspaces, Nepomuceno was able to expand the capacity of the engineering lab to allow for larger class sizes. “I reformatted the entire space by getting rid of the computer tables that were taking up a lot of space for [little] student use and built three new four-foot by six-foot workbenches that can now fit roughly 24 students, where the max in that room used to be 12,” Nepomuceno said. 

With fewer class periods offered this year, the engineering department needed to increase the capacity of the lab to make room for more students at a time. “Previously, these classes were capped at lower student counts per class period… There used to be three teachers that taught here, [but] now it’s myself and Dr. Miller, and Dr. Miller is teaching a lot of physics right now, so it’s a lot of just me in the lab. So we had to accommodate more students per class period just to make all [of] them fit,” Nepomuceno said.

With eighth graders entering the engineering program this year, Nepomuceno believes the new changes to the lab space will enable students to make the most of their engineering classes. “Now that we have more spots for students at the start of their engineering journey, [like in] the Lego class, I hope that we can get more students to fill in those spaces, [and] continue in their progression with the engineering lab,” Nepomuceno said.