“Work on hard projects — they’re the best projects.” That was the advice from Tom Dubick, Chair of the Innovation and Design department at Charlotte Latin School and the Director of the Fab Lab, to ten Latin students who were nearing completion of Fab Academy, a 20-week engineering program that teaches students the technical skills to develop and build prototypes. The Fab Academy program is taught at dozens of Fab Labs on six continents, from Ireland to India, but Charlotte Latin is the only outpost for high school students.

On Wednesday, June 12, dozens of Fab Academy enrollees around the world presented their final projects (via videoconferencing), including ten Latin students. Overseeing the presentations was Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor, the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, and the program director of Fab Academy. Dubick underscored Gershenfeld’s breadth of knowledge and experience to the dozens of parents, staff, and faculty filling up the Fab Lab, saying that Gershenfeld had often dodged his question of how many companies he had started until he finally admitted that he had lost count (but that he calculated that they were collectively worth about $2 billion). “Neil is the father of digital fabrication,” Dubick said.

The projects that Latin students presented ranged from a text-to-Braille converter to a treadmill for a finger skateboard: in each case, they shared a short video demonstrating the work they did and answered friendly-but-rigorous questions from Gershenfeld. “I made a Frisbee launcher,” announced Collin Kanofsky ’26. When Gershenfeld asked him what problems he had encountered along the way, Collin replied, “I had a lot of wheels exploding. It was a challenge, but I got there.”

“What do you think you need to do to go further?” Gershenfeld asked before delivering high praise: “That seems like a hard project — good job.”

“Talk about the motivating use case,” Gershenfeld prompted Landon Broadwell ’26, who made a helmet that gathered various types of data. “The comments in the chat are that what you invented is Boba Fett’s helmet,” Gershenfeld noted cheerfully.

The students presenting their final projects were Merritt Backerman ’25, Broadwell, Connor Cruz ’26, Alana Duffy ’25, Kanofsky, Evan Park ’26, Richard Shan ’26, David Tian ’25, David Vaughn ’26, Angelina Yang ’26, and Ryan Zhou ’26. (Dariyah Strachan ’25 was absent, but also completed a project; Innovation and Design teacher Zach Budzichowski also presented a project.) A successful presentation didn’t mean the project was over — the Fab Academy requires two more layers of approval and thorough documentation — but after a hundred hours (or more) spent making a functional prototype and adding the serious Fab Academy time commitment to a regular Charlotte Latin academic load through the spring of 2024, it was a significant enough milestone that parents gathered to toast their children with sparkling apple juice.

Portia Cruz, mother of Connor Cruz, loved how his project, an interactive map of Guam, preserved the oral history of the Pacific island where she grew up. “His project filled a big gap,” she said. “There’s no history book that has that stuff.”

“Before coming to Latin, I had no exposure to engineering,” Ryan Zhou said. “The Fab Lab is one of the reasons I came to school here.”

“It’s the best experience in his whole life,” said Bo Backerman, Merritt Backerman’s father.

“Great work from Charlotte Latin,” Gershenfeld announced from MIT. “I appreciate your age group challenging all the grad students.”