Father And Son Project Donated To NMS

By Eliza Hallabeck

Don Ramsey’s Newtown Middle School technology education students ventured out to the school’s back parking lot on Tuesday, May 26, where a creation of Sam Langdon and his father, Stephen, waited with its plush cushions and wheels.

The lounge-chair-turned-power-wheelchair was donated to the school after Sam and his father finished working on it for Sam’s eighth grade technology education project.

“We usually do something every year to entertain ourselves,” said Sam.

The motorized lounge chair was an idea started about a year ago, according to Sam, who attended a seventh grade technology education class Tuesday to describe to seventh grade students in Mr Ramsey’s class how he had created the moving chair with his father. 

After a time of not working on the chair, Sam and his father decided to pick it up again with Sam’s eighth grade project for “How Things Work,” the theme for eighth grade students in the technology education classes.

Sam said his father works for Curtis Instruments, an electronics store, and that helped supply the moving parts for the project. “We already had the recliner from home,” he said.

Creations like the motorized chair are not unfamiliar to Sam and his father, Sam said, because both of them “are into construction.”

During the morning class, Mr Ramsey said the chair is an example of how students in the technology education class bring the outside world into the four walls of technology education room.

Mr Ramsey said the motorized lounge chair has helped to introduce students to technology used for the handicapped.

“With this chair we went through many problems,” said Sam about creating the chair with his father. “It’s not all planned out. It’s going with it.”

Mr Ramsey agreed, and told the seventh grade students that is how great inventors work.

“They see a need,” said Mr Ramsey. “They identify a need, and they experiment.”

He said getting out of the classroom, out of the text book and taking things apart, with permission granted of course, is a way to up with new ideas.

“The only true failure,” said Mr Ramsey to the class, “is the failure to try.”