Demo Day in the Project Idea Realization Lab (PIRL) proves senior engineering students are ready to take on the future.

From a robotic card dealer to a model race car you can control with your eyes — the St. Stephen’s community was immensely impressed with student inventions that rival high-concept products currently on the market. 

Electronics and robotics instructor and Director of the PIRL Troy Lanier and computer science instructor Canon Ellis, who co-teach the Projects and Science and Technology course, hosted an open house for the community to tour 10 student inventions that were imagined, designed and built by a group of seniors over the last 10 months.

“Students get to spend the whole year building their dream project and we support them in that endeavor,” said Lanier.

Tianzi Liu ’25 loves lemonade, so she decided to build an automated lemonade machine, complete with a touchscreen and multiple flavor options. The exterior is a clear acrylic case that allows the consumer to see the internal electronics and tubes in action. Mr. Lanier encouraged Liu to use aluminum extrusions on the corners of the case to make it more stable, while keeping with the design aesthetic she was going for. Liu says the project enabled her to expand her coding abilities, learn how to program and activate a touchscreen and use a laser cutter — all skills she says will be valuable as a chemical engineering student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

Charlie Dugan ’25 plays a lot of card games with his friends, so he created a robotic car dealer that takes the manual labor and math mistakes out of dealing a deck of playing cards. You simply tell the square device how many players there are and how many cards everyone should get and it gets to work spinning around and spitting out the cards for each player. Inside the small wooden device is a microcontroller he programmed that computes the angle based on the amount of players and the number of cards. The project pushed Dugan to try his hand at using a laser cutter and a 3D printer for the first time, which took a lot of practice and problem solving. This is his second year taking robotics with Mr. Lanier, and he is looking forward to leaning into the science and engineering field in the future because it has been so fun.

Students enter the course with a strong ideation foundation from the art, science, technology, engineering and math courses they’ve taken throughout their St. Stephen’s journey, and a desire to test their bravery and challenge themselves.

Charlie Hubbard ’25 walked in about four or five months ago and asked if he could build a talking head using artificial intelligence. Fast forward to Demo Day and visitors watched Hubbard converse with the 3D printed robot.

“We give them the room to run,” said Lanier. “And there's a hidden curriculum in this class. A lot of it deals with learning about intrinsic motivation. Kids want to be here. They come in after hours to be here, and all of a sudden these projects just explode into wonderful things, metaphorically, of course.”

Starting in the fall, the Projects and Science and Technology course begins with a two week imagination phase of creation where they brainstorm ideas and bounce questions off of Lanier and Canon, who help narrow down their ideas based on a number of factors, including access to the required materials. And then, it’s go time.

“It's such a long journey, but seeing everything students came up with in the real world development — now working — is an incredible feeling,” said Ellis.

“It’s really been one of my favorite classes at St. Stephen’s,” said Dugan, who plans to major in Physics and Economics at Hobart College in New York. “Coming down here and working on this project for the past year has been the most fun thing that I do everyday.”

Learn more about the PIRL.