Purdue-created EPICS model aids K-12 schools in introducing students to engineering

Peace of mind.   

Ease of access.  

Affordable music.   

Each student who encounters Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) K-12 comes with a goal to help in mind, even if they weren't aware they had one at the start. Through the collaborative work of an EPICS team and the skills developed by learning how to design, build, troubleshoot and present a project, students can take their hopes and make them real-world successes.   

EPICS K-12 was established in 2006 as the middle and high school application of the Purdue-created EPICS model. EPICS K-12 combines hands-on development of professional skills in community settings for pre-college students in after-school programs and class curricula. Students participating in EPICS courses apply classroom-taught engineering skills to solve practical problems.  

“We always want engineers to be prepared for the real world when they graduate college, but we found that the journey to engineering begins in middle school with the math courses they take,” said Charese Williams, assistant director of high school programming at Purdue. “If we want students to succeed as engineers in the future, we want to start their immersion in all that engineering offers now.”  

An EPICS-built call for help   

Students who took the EPICS class at MET Professional Academy in Peoria, Arizona, worked with real-world partners for high school or college credit.  

But for Kohl McCabe, who took the class in 2019, it meant something a little different: He could finally create something to protect his mom, even when harm came behind closed doors.

The first lesson McCabe learned in the EPICS class was the importance of partnership with stakeholders. In his team’s case, the stakeholders were women’s shelters in and around Peoria. It was crucial to ask questions regarding their needs, struggles and future hopes to make a product that was both usable and relevant. 

“One of the things every shelter said was that they can provide resources and information to any woman who comes to them, but once she leaves those doors, they have no idea if that woman is safe anymore,” McCabe said.   

It was the same anxiety McCabe felt for his mother every time there was discord in his home growing up.  

“My mom had her phone taken from her and thrown at a wall,” McCabe, from Peoria, said. “She had no way to get help, and I was inspired to make a device that would protect my mom and people like her in unsafe situations.”  

McCabe created designs of what he called “subtle panic buttons.” He quickly found that he would need more than paper to show how these devices would work. McCabe was an entrepreneurial-focused student — he could present, design projects, and compete with those ideas, but making it? That was something entirely new.   

But with the support of teacher Justin Davis, McCabe was confident the team could take the subtle alarm from a paper design to a working device.   

The EPICS project quickly became known as Project Yarrow, named after the resilient flower. Growth in adversity is something McCabe hopes users of Project Yarrow’s products will discover within themselves. 

The team presented four ideas of a hidden alarm button to Davis and the Peoria area shelters. Set up with an online account of contacts to alert when activated, the object itself would be innocuous.  

It was safe communication and quick help, shaped like a supplementary charger. At least, that’s what the first patent application read.  

After graduating from MET Professional Academy in 2021, McCabe spent two years on a mission for the Church of Latter-Day Saints. By the time he returned from door-to-door ministry, his teammates had moved on — as had the momentum behind Project Yarrow. The patent had been rejected, too.   

Defeated, McCabe dabbled in some other lines of work and moved to Provo, Utah. He was a ranch hand, then a carpenter, but he couldn’t shake Project Yarrow from his every thought.   

“I knew I had the potential to impact the world,” McCabe said. “It was something I had always yearned for, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”  

So, in 2024, McCabe left his carpentry job and pursued building out Project Yarrow for maximum efficiency. He found a local business incubator, called iHub, and built relationships with mentors and other creatives. Soon enough, McCabe had a supportive network, several creative sounding boards and a refreshed energy to bring his EPICS project to a national audience.   

McCabe would finally complete his design in two forms — lip balm and lip gloss— for distribution at no cost to women’s shelters in early 2025. 

Peace of mind, as it turned out, came in the shape of a lip balm tube, now available for interested families to purchase through the Project Yarrow site. His resilience, built up from his time as an EPICS student in high school, finally helped him achieve his goal and pursue his passion.  

“Without EPICS, I wouldn’t have been challenged to create this,” McCabe said. “I think it’s going to help a lot of people.”  

Rebuilding a garden gate 

Greta Laubach’s encounter with EPICS was the result of coincidence after coincidence.  

Laubach, from Germany, chose to attend Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, because it gave her the opportunity to study abroad while still in high school. She moved to the United States for junior year in 2024 with classes focused on business. 

But she ended up signing up for Explorations in Engineering, a class designed with the EPICS model, a few weeks into the fall 2024 semester. Several of Laubach’s new friends at Foxcroft sang its praises — and she had a free period to burn. She figured it would be a fun addition to her adventure abroad, even if it was replacing the study hall that Laubach enjoyed.  

And then Laubach was leading an EPICS project with teammates from Denmark’s Faroe Islands, Saudi Arabia and Thailand that would serve the nearby Windy Hill Foundation long after the four students graduated from Foxcroft and have moved away from Middleburg.  

“Our first thought was to create garden beds for Windy Hill,” said Laubach, who graduated from Foxcroft in June 2025. “But then we saw that their garden gate was wrecked. We decided to fix that instead of building the garden beds.” 

The Windy Hill Foundation provides 800 residents with safe and affordable housing in community-owned neighborhoods throughout Loudoun and Fauquier counties in Virginia. Services also include free educational programs for children and adults, family activities, social activities for adult and elderly residents, and opportunities to create a thriving community among neighbors. Rene’s Roots — named for the original creator of the Windy Hill properties, Irene “Rene” Llewellyn — is one of the community gardens providing food and enrichment opportunities to residents of all ages.  

The original door to Rene’s Roots frequently was misaligned and became stuck. This posed an inconvenience to most residents and a serious fall risk to elderly residents, any time they wanted to tend the garden or go for a stroll. So the four-person team designed, purchased materials for, sanded and decorated a 6-foot-5 door­.  

Laubach’s draw to lead the project as the liaison brought new challenges, especially in being a good leader to a diverse and motivated group of students. While she had the big picture of the project to work with in a step-by-step fashion, Laubach had to find a way to communicate the deadlines to her teammates and support them as they designed and constructed the garden gate — all while learning more about each other with every conversation.  

“It was really fun to work together with so many different backgrounds and opinions,” Laubach said. “We went shopping for supplies together, and we'd just talk about all of our different backgrounds and cultures while we worked. I learned a lot about engaging a team and making working together fun, too.” 

Supplies came from a variety of shops, from millworks to the Foxcroft maintenance office. The students used PVC pipe, glossy paint, enamel and a laser cutter to make a weather-withstanding and easy-to-move garden gate for Windy Hill.  

Laubach herself designed and painted the new logo of Rene’s Roots for the door, inspired by the name to create a colorful tree design. The team mixed paint colors by hand to get them just right, standing out on the white door as a subtle welcome sign for Windy Hill residents.  

“It was so relieving to see it all come together and look good,” Laubach said.  

The Windy Hill community celebrated the installation of the new gate, complete with local artists attending, a newspaper feature and a general delight in its creation.  

Laubach is proud to have led the project. She returned to Foxcroft for senior year and, after graduating in May 2025, holds the EPICS model class as one of the best things she had tried on study abroad. And while she might not be pursuing engineering in college, Laubach learned plenty about engineering in a hands-on fashion — namely, how vast engineering was as a discipline, from building to printing to coding.  

To Laubach, it seemed that all those coincidences led her to create a meaningful experience — and leave a legacy.  

“I thought we’d be talking about things in a theoretical way and not actually doing the things,” Laubach said. “I didn’t expect us to build a door in the end, which was exciting to me. Now, I'm going back to Germany, and I will always know that I left something in the U.S. that I designed and built with my own hands. I left something behind that is going to help other people.”  

Music to a budget’s ears  

Alex Lizmi in Hereford, Maryland, had an idea to make an impact. It involved computer-aided design (CAD), 3D printing and riffing Van Halen songs on an electric guitar.  

The guitar Lizmi made for his EPICS project cost him $23. And sounded almost identical to the Stratocaster Lizmi had purchased years before for over $800, sonically inspired by Van Halen’s self-made guitar, Frankenstrat.

To follow in the footsteps of an idol was a driving factor behind Lizmi’s EPICS project, but it wasn’t the only purpose. Lizmi used a few affordable resources, like an artificial intelligence-driven amplifier, to create a 3D printed, resin guitar that looked and sounded like the real deal. And it saved him some serious cash: amplifiers, pedals, replacement strings and other musical instrument maintenance can cost hundreds, if not thousands, if longevity and reliability are important.  

“Economics should not impact music anymore,” Lizmi said. “With new and cheaper technology for these instruments, anyone can have affordable access to any form of sound they need.”  

In his 2024 engineering designer research class — based on the EPICS model at Purdue — at Hereford High, Lizmi focused on the music department as his stakeholders. The limit: the minimal available budget.    

So Lizmi went as cheap as he could find, using already existing school resources to code, print, paint and test his guitar. He modeled the guitar through the CAD software Autodesk 123D and siphoned resin strips through the 3D printer to give the lightweight product a professional and glossy finish.   

After recording the final comparison between his Stratocaster and the resin guitar, Lizmi brought his creation to the design class and showed it to his classmates. And then the music teacher. And the principal.   

“That class was the peak of my engineering experience in high school,” Lizmi said. “I learned skills like soldering, resin 3D printing, woodworking and coding. Without that, I don’t think I would be able to make this guitar. I would never have known where to start.”  

Anyone who could stop to appreciate just a few seconds of Van Halen’s “Panama” would receive a visit from Lizmi, including his teacher, Michael Dodd-O, who taught the engineering design course for 10 years.  

Lizmi is pursuing mechanical engineering in college and seeks to create a band’s worth of 3D printed instruments in the future, complete with a fully stocked drum set. And, now that he’s made one, another well-furnished and fully functional electric guitar for just $23.  

It’s all thanks to the skills and opportunities he learned through EPICS. Just like Project Yarrow, the Windy Hill garden gate and the hundreds of EPICS creations spanning 17 states and 30 years.  

The EPICS model is available to hundreds of universities, high schools and middle schools through generous gifts and consequential leaders. Contributions to EPICS K-12 provide training and free curriculum resources to EPICS K-12 students and teachers. Become a partner to EPICS by giving a gift.