On Thursday students from Paul Osborne’s computer science and engineering classes at Redmond High School held a Computer Science and Engineering Expo.

Students from three class periods showcased their projects, including a mechanical horse, quad copters, touch-screen pong game, laser tag, vex-powered RF-controlled rolling robots, a track timer, a synthesizer and more. Students put the projects on display for family members and others in the computer science or engineering fields to see during the expo.

Students worked alone or in teams to create their projects. Each project followed these steps:

Identify and clarify a problem that can be addressed with prudent application of electronic and mechanical components driven by a small computer.

Define a project to address that problem, identifying the hardware and software components of that project.

Assign responsibilities for these components with a project team.

Design each component. For hardware, this means identifying individual parts to be procured and design parts to be fabricated in class. For software, this means defining what the required computer programs are to do and how the software parts work together.

Construct the physical parts. This includes designing and fabricating printed circuit boards, assembling components, preparing breadboard tests of components, and integrating all pieces in the final project.

Write, test and debug the software.