Teen Face: Maria Carrillo senior has passion for making things work

Maria Carrillo High School senior Evan Drake can spell potentiometer and he knows how to use one, too.

The 17-year-old track and cross country runner is also a founding member and president of the school’s Make Club that sets out to build, invent and explore how things work. He basically runs the show, according to mathematics teacher Margaret BradyLong.

“He is astonishing. He has a natural inclination toward physics,” BradyLong said. “He does a lot of studying on his own, tinkering on his own.”

Drake said his interest in making things began two years ago. Driven by boredom to his family’s garage one afternoon, he found a stack of pine wood slabs and tools and decided to build a dollhouse for his younger sister, Emily.

Using a saw and geometry principles he’d just learned in class, Drake built a one-room house with two windows and a door. Then he decided to build a little light his sister could turn on and off with a bulb from a flashlight hooked up to a 9-volt battery.

“It’s an incredible thing to have an idea and make it a reality,” Drake said.

He was hooked. From there, the experiments continued.

He looked up tutorials in books and online to learn how to build components that make lights flash or dim. He became interested in a microcontroller board called an Arduino that can be used with other electrical components for a range of functions. Drake used the Arduino to build a robotic hand that mimics gestures of a hand wearing a special glove.

“That was the tipping point, that was the first point I realized I was involved in ‘Make,’” Drake said.

Drake is referring to the “maker movement” bent on creating and building with hands and imagination. Over the past two years, Drake has progressed from that tiny bulb in the dollhouse to the robotic hand and bowls he’s fashioned using a woodworking technique called woodturning.

Recently, he built an electromagnet with an 18-volt weed wacker battery that runs through a transformer he removed from a microwave. The electromagnet can lift a 25-pound block of iron.

“It was the first time I took a physical principle I understood and created something I have never seen before, something that wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t copying someone,” Drake said.

At school, Drake helped Make Club members build a lighted sign for the school’s Under the Stars dance. He’s leading the group to use woodworking, plumbing and electronic skills to make a T-shirt cannon to use at rallies and sports games.

“That’s part of ‘Make’ - getting other people into it, it’s not going to be taught to you unless you pursue it,” Drake said.

Drake isn’t merely physics-focused. He sings in both the chamber singers and jazz choir, is a runner and on the wrestling team.

But, back to the potentiometer. Drake described it as an electrical piece used to change the amount ?of electricity flowing through ?another component using ?resistance.

It’s a handy device, a type of which he used in the robotic hand. He used other models to build a guitar amplifier and a generator he built to control the speed of a motor.

Drake said he’s recently become enamored with the work of Nikola Tesla, an inventor and engineer who around the turn of the century developed projects with the idea of providing the populace with free wireless electricity.

“I like the devotion to improving other’s lives through science instead of making money from it,” he said.