Park Heights Academy – Honors Engineering Practicum

Apr 2026 · 2nd Semester

The Senior Engineering Practicum is Poly’s capstone engineering design and laboratory course. Students will explore engineering problem solving and design and will complete solutions to various engineering challenges. Students learn through lectures, laboratories, various outside assignments, and special projects. Topics of the course include: engineering ethics and problem solving; experimentation and technical writing; measurements, uncertainty, and error; materials science and engineering; teamwork, engineering design, and prototyping. The course objective is to introduce students not only to the different fields of engineering but also to the analytic tools and techniques that the profession uses. This course is loosely modeled off the Johns Hopkins University Engineering Innovation (What is Engineering?) course and the University of Maryland Introduction to Engineering Design course during the fall semester and has been funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, MD. Students should expect this course to resemble introductory freshmen engineering lab/design courses at the university level, and students will be held to an equivalent level of responsibility and rigor.