In a first-time collaboration between the LAU School of Engineering (SOE) and the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a team of 12 multidisciplinary students took home one of the top awards at the Georgia Tech Capstone Design Expo last month.

Their project is a makerspace kit for school children, a buildable kit that teaches creative arts to students between the ages of nine and 12, to enhance learning outcomes. The toolkit, designed with the help of the Georgia Tech team and developed at the LAU Engineering Labs and Research Center, was tested and evaluated in class at the Collège des Saints-Cœurs (SSCC) in Lebanon.

The team comprised Adian Basalay, Alexander Hom, Iretomide Olayeye, Mohen Li, Jared Teiger, and Yeji Han, from Georgia Tech, as well as LAU mechatronics engineering majors Ghassan Kaskas and Serge El Skaff and computer engineering students Hillary Tannous, Mohamad Kalaoun, Steven Mansour and Toni Tannous.

Their collaboration was established through LAU President Chaouki T. Abdallah’s former colleagues at Georgia Tech and facilitated by the SOE. The participating Honors students were selected from the Civic Engagement for Engineers course, taught by Dr. Elie Elias.

Witnessing first-hand the impact of teaching interruptions across the country due to conflict last semester, the students took matters into their own hands and headed to the SSCC, where they conducted interviews with the administration and teachers to identify possible areas of improvement and gaps in resources that could enhance the educational experience.

They then brainstormed with their international peers to come up with potential solutions and means to measure learning outcomes. Together, they produced three prototypes that were 3D-printed on campus: a customizable music device, a storytelling mannequin kit with narrative dice prompts, and a Zoetrope animation kit— a rotational animation device that facilitates visual storytelling.

After testing the three prototypes with the SSCC middle-school students, they selected the Zoetrope animation kit, which garnered the most engagement and educational impact in the SSCC classroom, to present at Georgia Tech’s Capstone Design Expo.

SOE Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Civil Engineering Caesar Abi Shdid explained that the course with Dr. Elias trained students to conduct qualitative interviews, run field visits, generate conceptual ideas and refine them by producing prototypes, and test learning efficacy using pre- and-post-assessment tools.

He further underscored how this experience goes in line with the SOE ethos of promoting interdisciplinary teamwork and human-centered solutions rooted in user research, as well as applying STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts and mathematics) principles to real-world tools, and adhering to safety standards while abiding by design specifications.

“The collaboration with Georgia Tech also offered our students exposure to global design practices and a path to take part in the GT Capstone Expo, thereby deepening their technical scope and career readiness,” said Dr. Abi Shdid.

Looking to the future, he added, the SOE plans “to align civic engagement and capstone projects more tightly, selecting students’ creations that involve both hardware and software components, and ones that have local community relevance. This extends LAU’s mission of applied, civic-oriented learning and, in this case, engineering.”

To that extent, SOE Dean Michel Khoury noted how “this inaugural collaboration with Georgia Tech exemplifies the School of Engineering’s commitment to global engagement, experiential learning, and community-driven innovation, laying the groundwork for future joint initiatives that prepare students to engineer solutions with real-world impact.”