JACKSON TWP — Google made waves in business and technology circles more than 10 years ago when it started allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever project they wanted.

The idea behind the “20 percent time” was to allow them to be creative, take initiative and develop ideas that would benefit the company.

Steve Fortunato, Seneca Valley High School engineering teacher, was hoping this past semester to help students discover more about their interests when he started a similar project.

Fortunato did a “20 percent” project with students in his three honors engineering application classes. From October to January, the students spent every Monday working on something that they were interested in.

Fortunato approved the ideas before they got started, but they did not have to be science or engineering related.

“Part of my job as an educator is to help them find their passion,” he said.

“If it’s something you’re passionate about, you’ll find a way to learn about. You’ll educate yourself.”

The engineering class, which is for juniors and seniors, is meant to give a broad overview of engineering. Students need to take time on their own to find out whether or not they would be interested in pursuing different types of engineering after high school.

“The worst feeling is waking up every day and going to a job you’re really kind of unsure about,” he told the class.

At the end of the semester, which was last week, the students gave presentations on what they had worked on or learned.

Some of the projects included working on programming a video game, researching spectrometry, designing a Rube Goldberg machine, working on an art portfolio and creating a video promoting the class.

Adam Mascio, a senior, showed the class on Thursday some of the pencil and charcoal drawings he worked on.

“Everyone needs a creative outlet of some sort and ever since high school mine has been art,” Adam said.

His drawings were black-and-white portraits of people meant to look androgynous.

“I want people to draw their own meaning from it,” he said.

Seniors Jason Happ and Austin Young designed and built a Rube Goldberg machine, which uses a complicated series of reactions and a maximum amount of effort to create a minimal result. They used dominoes, a ball running on a track and other household items to make a machine that puts toothpaste on a toothbrush.

Happ said their device took five hours to construct, outside of class, though once they got it set up, they were able to film a successful run in one take.

The two had built similar machines before for fun, Jason said.

“It was the first thing that popped into my head,” he said about when the 20 percent project was first explained.

Kyle Dayton talked about designing a level of a video game using development software Unity 5.

Starting from scratch, he programmed a three-dimensional level including woods, mountains and a house to be part of a physics-based puzzle game, he said.

“Literally every part of this I made myself,” Kyle said.