Elizabethtown High School (Elizabethtown Independent) students work on a group project in Missy Mill’s engineering class. Photo by Myles Young, Kentucky Department of Education, Aug. 27, 2026
(ELIZABETHTOWN, KY) – Students in an engineering class at Elizabethtown High School (Elizabethtown Independent) aren’t just learning skills to help them in their future careers; they are creating projects to benefit their community. So far, they have created a lake-cleaning robot, an irrigation system for a community garden and a power bench where people can peddle to charge their devices.
Missy Mills, an engineering teacher at Elizabethtown High School, has helped her students get more involved in the community by making different projects each year, while improving their previous years’ projects. She said her engineering class is a great place for students to experience vibrant learning.
“Engineering is like the perfect example of project-based learning,” Mills said. “We do real-life projects, and our community knows that because they see it.”
Her class started participating in the Altec Innovation Challenge in 2020, and since then her students have won the challenge for three different projects.
Each year, Altec invites high school students to address a real-world problem that benefits their local community. Teams present their project ideas, and the winning team receives $10,000 to implement their project.
“It’s a great process for these kids to come up, find a problem and solve it,” Mills said. “They have to do a budget, they have to do a professional presentation, a selling presentation. We practiced numerous times on that because I believe that communication skills are very important in whatever you’re teaching.”
Students in Mills’ class won the challenge for the first time in 2022 with their lake-cleaning robot for the local Freeman Lake.
The fully autonomous boat, which Mills’ students have worked on over the course of four years, works on a GPS system to pick up trash on the lake. When the project is finished, the boat will start at a docking station and will outline the lake once a day. There’s a conveyor belt system on the front to pick up trash, which will dump it in a bin at the back of the boat. Then a crew at the lake will dump out the bin each day. It’s powered by a motor and solar panels.
Mills explained that students from LaRue County have been going to her class to study engineering and participated in Altec alongside Elizabethtown students. In 2021, a group of LaRue County students came up with the idea for the lake-cleaning robot.
Elizabethtown High School (Elizabethtown Independent) Engineering Teacher Missy Mills discusses her student’s award-winning project, a robot designed by her students to automatically clean the local Freeman Lake. Photo by Myles Young, Kentucky Department of Education, Aug. 27, 2026
They didn’t win the challenge at first, but the next year, they created a prototype and made additional innovations and won the challenge in 2022. Sage Garris was a senior at LaRue County when his group won.
“I enjoyed the physical hands-on prototype creation, and then the presentation went amazing,” Garris said. “We had the prototype there in front of the judges and they loved seeing a physical product and we ended up getting first place.”
The group came up with a budget and a plan. Garris said the product changed a few times over the course of working on it, which helped him gain soft skills in addition to engineering skills.
“I definitely learned a lot of useful skills in terms of communication with a team, and then in itself, there was a lot of new skill sets that we had to learn just working with sheet metal, working with different materials, rubbers and product design. I’d never done any of that before,” Garris said.
Now a mechanical engineering student at the University of Kentucky, Garris said the project sparked more of a love for engineering and helped him decide what he wanted to do after high school.
“It was the first real design project I had,” Garris said. “I don’t mind math or science; I like it, but I’m starting to get into some upper-level classes right now, and I’m just remembering how much I really do like the design aspect of engineering and being able to create things.”
Jonathan Hall, a senior at Elizabethtown High School, is one student who took over the lake-cleaning robot project after the original group of students graduated. He revamped it by taking everything off the main body and putting it back on in a different format. He said he’s learned many skills throughout his time working on the project, including soft skills and engineering skills.
“I’ve definitely learned more problem-solving,” Hall said. “But there’s also the skills to be able to drill through metal, which takes a lot more than you’d think; and then being able to wire things, like the motor to the GPS …. It gave me a lot of knowledge on how to do that kind of thing.”
Mills said she saw Hall’s leadership skills increase drastically through her class since he was a freshman.
“For me as a teacher, he is an excellent example of that growth from a freshman to a senior,” Mills said. “That is one of the biggest growth areas and skills Jonathan has learned over the past four years, is being a true leader with anything that he does.”
She said even for students in her class who don’t pursue engineering, they gain other skills that help them in all areas of life.
“Communication, problem-solving and leadership – all the other stuff like working through metal is awesome too – but these soft skills that he has enhanced for himself through these projects, he’s carrying those with him forever.”
Hall is also in a group that won the Altec challenge in 2024 to build an irrigation system for a local community garden.
He explained that United Way of Central Kentucky has a community garden in Elizabethtown for the homeless population and others in need. The irrigation system project will water plants in greenhouse planter boxes when they need to be watered. The project includes stationary sprinklers, soil moisture sensors and a solar-powered design that integrates with a rainwater collection system providing precise water management for optimal plant growth.
“What we’re working on now, which is the hardest part, is getting the actual irrigation part of it done,” Hall said. “We need the moisture sensors to detect when there’s no water or when there is enough water. We need the interface, (where) the idea is that you can select a plant that you’re going to put in a pot and then it will adjust the amount of water to that plant.”
He said the sprinklers will automatically drop down how much water each plant needs and shut off when that plant is done.
Another project the engineering class won in 2022 for the Altec challenge is a power bench for a local park. Mills explained that people can sit at the bench and use bike peddles to generate energy for an attached power station that can be used to charge devices.
Students started with a wooden spool that they turned into a table, and built seats around it attached to the table. Then they wired the power station to the bike peddles. Mills said it will allow users to get exercise while also charging their devices in an eco-friendly way.
Beyond the Altec challenge, students participate in other projects throughout the year. Each Christmas, they build Christmas displays for different places in their community. Mills said it started three years ago when the local police department asked if her students wanted to build displays.
Her class has also built planter boxes for the district’s elementary school. She said people in the community come to her class to ask if they can make projects because of how well-known they have become.
“It’s real-world experience for them and so I think it’s great,” Mills said. “We build, we fix stuff, we do projects all the time outside of the classroom as well. It’s constant.”
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