Get Hyped About STEM!

In partnership with Columbia Engineering and Teachers College, Hypothekids introduces students to science, technology, engineering, and math.

Sep 02 2016

For the high school students in Hypothekids, summers are spent engineering solutions in the lab.

About the Hk Maker Lab
—Video by Robert Branch

In partnership with Columbia Engineering and Teachers College, Hypothekids, born out of Harlem Biospace, is an educational initiative that introduces students to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)  by having them design, prototype, and test a biomedical device. Its Hk Maker Lab, a six-week summer program in Columbia’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, led by SEAS Senior Lecturer Aaron Kyle, teaches the foundations of engineering and culminates in a pitch event to executives in the biomedical community.

At the Aug. 25 final pitch event held on campus, two Maker Lab teams stood out. Winning the Judges’ Award was the team behind Cathalert, a device that alerts the user when the needle has been inserted into the vein properly or has gone through the vein and into the tissue. And, Audience Choice went to the team that pitched Cerequa, a water filtering system for low-resource settings.

Three “alums”—Omar Asous, Rohan Sukhdeo, and Brian Yang—of the summer program are set to attend Columbia Engineering this fall. The program’s success is seen as a model for high schools, and through grants from the Pinkerton Foundation and the NIH SEPA, Maker Lab also trains local high school teachers, so that they can subsequently integrate the engineering concepts into their own teachings.

Hear what students say about Hypothekids:

—Video by Robert Branch

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