There’s lots of young inventors in the Albert Lea School District.

And thanks to a $55,000 grant from a nationally known foundation, the engineering courses at Southwest Middle School and Albert Lea High School will soon expand to keep up with the ideas.

The Kern Family Foundation out of Waukesha, Wis., awarded the grant to help Albert Lea industrial technology teachers Mike Sundblad and Casey McIntyre with implementing new pre-engineering courses during the next three years at the middle school and high school.

The courses, which are developed through a nonprofit educational program called Project Lead the Way, will give the students the education they need to develop strong backgrounds in engineering and other technical careers.

Sundblad said eventually he hopes there will be at least five engineering classes to offer to interested students, along with a gateway program at Southwest to help get students ready for the courses at the high school.

“The current grant is definitely going to enable us to grow this program,” he said.

At a time when the district is having to make cuts, the grant will allow the teachers to do something extra for the students that might not have otherwise been possible. It will also help educate the teachers through a two-week intensive training session.

“I think the program itself is a great opportunity for so many students,” Sundblad said. It will attract a lot of potential engineers and designers.

In the Introduction to Engineering Design classes Wednesday, the students were busy working in pairs to design desktop organizers.

The assignment sheet stated the organizer must not attach to the desk and must include a recessed area. It must have a minimum of five different parts once assembled and must hold a minimum of six items.

The goal of the organizer, the student assignment sheet stated, was to be “a product that will reduce the clutter that accumulates on office desks and free up space.”

To complete the assignment, students researched desktop organizers and drafted their designs in their engineering notebooks. The designs had to be signed by another student, so nobody else could take the idea. The ideas were reviewed by their teacher.

On Wednesday, partners Brady Falk and Christian Andersen were transporting their design from paper onto the computer software program called Auto Desk Inventor.

Though the 3-D modeling computer program seemed complex at first, it was something they got used to quickly, Falk and Andersen said.

Their desktop organizer had a built-in pencil sharpener, an area for a stapler, papers and even a hole for computer cords to go through.

“We wanted to try and put everything on a desk into one space,” Falk said.

The two teenagers indicated they want to work in the engineering field when they grow up and they are excited at the possibility of additional engineering classes at the high school. Falk said he wants to do something with cars and Andersen said he wants to do aerospace engineering.

Falk, Andersen and the other students in the class worked intently to the end of the class.

When the bell rang, none of the students in the classroom even budged from their computers. They appeared to be enthralled in their designs.

Project Lead The Way Courses are accessible to college-bound engineering students as well as students who may not have thought of a career in a technical field. The Kern Family Foundation in Waukesha, Wis., is one source of funding for Project Lead The Way sites in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa.