2019-20 BTC Calendar: ENGR 112 and Sophie Harrison

What happens when engineering and music intersect, when visionaries access the tools and collaborative makerspaces they need to innovate and create together? Just ask Stone Spring Elementary School’s teachers and students who are reaping the rewards. JMU freshman engineering majors were challenged in a spring 2018 ENGR 112 course to collaborate with music education peers to develop instruments for children with atypical physical or mental abilities. In February, they consulted Stone Spring students, and by April the children had prototypes to play. That summer, JMU students brought the adaptive instruments idea to JMU’s Leslie Flanary Gilliam Center for Entrepreneurship. There, they created a short-lived social venture that led to an exciting spin-off: Through a grant from the College of Visual and Performing Arts, music education major Sophie Harrison (’20) is taking adaptive music to the youth of the Bon Air Detention Center in Richmond.