Heroes of the Week: Tennessee students create robotic hand for classmate

 This week's heroes are three very intelligent, innovative students with big hearts that gave one student the ability to use a hand that he'd never been able to use before. They created one for him using their ingenuity and a 3-D printer. Here's the amazing story from CBS News.

(Photo: the three students who built a robotic hand for Sergio Peralta (2nd from left). Credit: CBS)

Tennessee students create robotic hand for new classmate: "They changed my life"

HENDERSONVILLE, Ten. (WKRC/WTVF/CBS Newspath) - After a month of hard work, a team of high school engineering students in Tennessee built a fellow student at their school a robotic prosthetic hand.

In the Hendersonville High School engineering class, students are creators.

"You're supposed to be engineering, coming up with new ideas, solving issues, and just making things better than how they used to be," said senior Leslie Jaramillo.

The class, called "Engineering: Design and Development," is where many students became friends.

"I've definitely made most of the memories that I've made here inside this classroom," said junior Ella Holtermann.

Not long into the semester, the student brought a new person into the fold.

"I didn't know them. So, I actually got introduced to them by the teacher, and then that's what I started working on and I got to be friends with them," said sophomore Sergio Peralta. Peralta isn't in their class, but quickly became a part of every class period.

"As I was growing up, like during my first years of school, I had a lot of people asked me what's wrong with -- what happened to my hand, lots of people, and I used to just say even in kindergarten, ‘I was born like that,'" he said.

Peralta was born with one hand that never fully formed. "It really wasn't that difficult," he said. "I got used to it so that I could do pretty much a lot of stuff, almost everything."

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/tXwFe7wrJSE

The "almost everything" part is why his fellow students were tasked with building him a prosthetic hand.

"I didn't know Sergio when we were gonna do this," Leslie said. "We were kind of starting from scratch, but we were able to look at some previous designs from online and once we started with an idea, it went off from there."

After four weeks of designing, 3D printing, and sizing to Peralta's hand, the class put their product to the test with a game of catch.

It turned into a new hobby Peralta never knew was possible.

"I never expected this. Living without a hand for 15 years and they actually offered me two is actually pretty cool. No one has ever offered me this stuff," he said. "Changed my life"