March 23, 2022

STEAM students present to Eaton Corp

Upper St. Clair High School STEAM students recently traveled to Eaton Corp in Moon Township to present their work to a team of corporate executives. Students were tasked with researching and developing solutions for a variety of challenges, from designing electric vehicle charging facilities to cryptocurrency mining.

The students are enrolled in the STEAM Innovation & Consulting course taught by Mr. Fred Peskorski. Within the class, students work to solve real world problems using Human Centered Design techniques as well as more traditional problem-solving methods.

The final phase of this course requires students to work with industry partners to solve real problems that need to be addressed within those companies. Students have been working with Eaton Corp, an international Fortune 500 Company that focuses on reliable, efficient, safe and sustainable power management technologies.

“Our students were able to travel to Eaton’s Beaver plant and got to tour their facilities as well as meet with their points of contact for more in-depth conversations about each team's problems,” Mr. Peskorski said. “Most teams set up weekly remote meetings with their Eaton advisors as they continued to work toward implementable solutions.”

Mr. Brooke Lang, vice-president and general manager of Eaton’s Components Division, is an Upper St. Clair resident and parent. He contacted Mr. Peskorski last year with a willingness to partner and collaborate with the STEAM students.

“We appreciate the students’ new ideas and insights,” Mr. Lang said. “We are a learning organization, so it is a big part of what we want to do. The students bring a much different perspective to these challenges that we are working on and will help us to progress these initiatives at Eaton.”

This is the second year that Eaton has partnered with the STEAM course. Due to the pandemic, last year’s presentations were conducted virtually.

“Last year was especially difficult because of the pandemic, but they were great partners and really brought a lot to the table,” Mr. Peskorski said. “I was happy that they were agreeable to come back to work with us again this year.”

The STEAM Innovation & Consulting course gives students an opportunity to apply newly learned problem-solving methods and their own unique strengths to solve real world challenges. These are problems that are varied in scope and often require students to explore new subject areas that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to learn about.

Prior to their work with Eaton Corp, these students worked with EAFab, a Pittsburgh-based company that designs and fabricates equipment and parts for steel mills throughout North America. Following this collaboration, students will spend time working on issues within the school district and township to finish up the 2021-22 school year.

The STEAM Innovation & Consulting course was launched in 2014 as a partnership between the Upper St. Clair and South Fayette high schools, the Luma Institute, All Clad Metalcrafters LLC, and EAFab Corp. It has since grown to include Bethel Park High School, Peters Township High School, Tom Brown Inc., Eaton Corp and OZ Enterprises.

Any corporations or organizations that may be interested in partnering with the STEAM Innovation & Consulting course, should contact Mr. Peskorski at fpeskorski@uscsd.k12.pa.us.

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Eaton Corp STEAM Challenges

Charging Facility Design
Student Team Members: Natalie Campagna, Phil Majkic & Ritvik Shaw
Eaton Corp Liaisons: Brad Leccia & Brian Carlson
Define and create a model for the layout of a long-haul interstate charging facility for electric vehicles. Include the number of chargers, distance between chargers, flow of traffic, total space required, and any other facilities (store, food, etc.) that should be included.

Charging Locations
Student Team Members: Zack Sileo, Arun Vasudevan, Aiden Shafer & Allen Ho
Eaton Corp Liaisons: Brad Leccia & Brian Carlson
Estimate total number of charging stations & chargers needed to support the USA interstate network and target geographic locations.

Cryptocurrency
Student Team Members: Jack Berger, Isaac Yap & Jakob Satterfield
Eaton Corp Liaisons: Jeremy Novotney and Christian Abel
Evaluate the opportunity and develop a sales strategy to help drive Eaton Corp growth in powering the growing market of cryptocurrency mining.

Commodity Tracker
Student Team Members: Prapti Kanani, Jeet Sutreja & Dan Paulick
Eaton Corp Liaison:  Lyle Sprinkle
Tear down and record the amount of select commodities (Copper, Silver, Resins, Metal) that are in featured breakers. Take the historical commodity prices compared to today’s and calculate the cost impact that these changes have on the given circuit breakers. Define the price increase for each breaker required to hold the profit margin.

Remote Overhead Breaker
Student Team Members: Carter Gerlach, Neeve McCormick & Sujay Shaw
Eaton Corp Liaison:  Brooke Lang
Design an application and mechanism to enable remote operation and monitoring of an electrical bus plug that will ensure that the right bus plug is activated and eliminates unplanned downtime.

Fleet Manager
Student Team Members: Trevor Lamb, Andrew Happ, Vidhur Senthil & Josh Ortiz-Rivera
Eaton Corp Liaison: Jim Lagree
Design an application that controls and monitors the charging of a fleet of electric vehicles such that a single charger can be efficiently shared between all vehicles.