Seniors in Biomedical Innovations, the final course of Skyline’s Health and Medicine Magnet, or the Medical Magnet, are now starting the end-of-year capstone projects, an undertaking they have been anticipating since joining the Magnet as sophomores.
Every Magnet at Skyline includes an end-of-high school culminating project, though the format varies by the program. For the Medical Magnet, it’s an opportunity to showcase your research and analysis skills while utilizing everything you have learned in the last three years.
“It’s an opportunity to really demonstrate what you’ve learned,” says Health and Medicine Magnet teacher Dusti Vincent, “or to explore a topic in more depth and utilize research skills and all these other things that we had been practicing over the years.”
The project has virtually endless options on what students can pursue: anywhere from researching bacteria around the school, to finding professionals students can shadow. The assignment is made solely to fit students’ interests and what they want to learn more about.
Shola Bailey (‘26) and Gabi Marble (‘26) are planning on interviewing the Skyline Trainers about common causes of injury in student athletes. Their final product will be a video presentation and poster discussing their interview and prevention with recovery techniques.
Lia Chung (‘26) and River Pham (‘26) are running an experiment on how music affects stress levels by having participants complete a timed task, with and without music, while simultaneously tracking their heart rate and performance time.
“I chose this project because I’m interested in how something as simple as music can influence both mental and physical responses to stress in everyday situations,” says Chung.
While some projects were made to satisfy a student’s personal curiosity, others were designed with the intent to be something that keeps going years after the student has left the school.
“So [there] was a project where [students] wanted to raise awareness around a rare disease that they had learned about, and they organized this walk,” says Vincent. “They collected donations, and the money went to this foundation. It was such a success that we just kind of kept it going… Every year we pick a different kind of cause or different nonprofit to donate to.”
In a previous year, a student wanted to conduct an experiment to figure out which areas of the school harbored the most bacteria. At this time, Skyline had a computer lab. The student swabbed the keyboards and found higher amounts of bacteria than any other places tested.
“ … He shared his work with the admin, so it actually implemented a change,” says Vincent. “They started purchasing cleaning products … And then that was one that I thought was really memorable because it ended up resulting in something that was effective and caused some change in the school.”
In one project this year, Maggie Wancier (‘26) and Maya Neblett (‘26) look to investigate the effects of historical redlining and housing discrimination on present-day water quality, specifically lead concentration, and its implications concerning child development and schooling outcomes.
“We are sampling water from public library drinking fountains from six locations across southeast Michigan with varying redlining histories and present-day median household incomes,” says Wancier. “These locations are Ypsilanti, Detroit, Chelsea, Ann Arbor, Grosse Pointe, and Bloomfield Township.”
At the end of the school year, both the Health and Medicine Magnet and the Design, Technology, and Environmental Planning (DTEP) Magnet are coming together to have an event to showcase the capstone projects called the STEAM Expo.
“That’s usually in May,” says Vincent, “and that’s where our students have usually displayed their work, so they put their posters up. DTEP students usually have a table, or have some of their inventions or projects displayed in some format.”
The skills learned in this project are essential both when students go to college and when most of them enter the medical field or a science-related field.
“The firsthand research is really a useful skill, but I think it’s more about just having an opportunity to look at something deeply and kind of satisfy your curiosity,” says Vincent. “[Science] is about being curious and about finding answers, and also knowing how to use evidence to support a position or to support a hypothesis, whether that’s evidence that you’ve collected or evidence that someone else has collected. I think that’s a very important skill moving forward: everything’s based on evidence.”
