More specifically, the 10-year-old from Columbia, Missouri was asked to participate in the Superhero Cyborgs program in San Francisco, a workshop hosted by nonprofit KIDmob and 3-D software firm Autodesk. The program connects children with upper-limb differences with professional engineers so that they can design and create their own custom-made prosthetics that do, well, whatever the kids want them to do.

Jordan was born with a limb difference: her left arm stops just above the elbow. When she found out she was headed to the Superhero Cyborg workshop, she was over the moon. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,’” she says.

Over the course of five days, she and five other kids between the ages of 10 and 15 worked with design experts and engineers from Autodesk to brainstorm ideas. “Basically, if they could design the prosthetic or body modification of their dreams in a superhero context, what would that look like?” asks Sarah O’Rourke, a senior product marketing manager with Autodesk.

“The testing and prototyping was amazing. There was glitter everywhere.”

For Jordan, it looks very sparkly. Her plan was to transform her arm into a cannon that spread a delightful cloud of glitter wherever she went. She started with a few sketches. Then she created a 3-D-printed cast of her arm and a plastic cuff made to fit over it, for prototyping purposes. The kids used Autodesk’s 3-D design tools like TinkerCAD and Fusion 360 to test their prototypes. “It was so fun,” says KIDmob co-director Kate Ganim. “The testing and prototyping was amazing. There was glitter everywhere.”

By day five, Jordan had come up with a working 3-D-printed prototype: a five-barrel glitter cannon that spewed sparkles with the pull of a string. She named it “Project Unicorn.”

“For us, our interest is in getting kids familiar with taking an idea from concept to execution and learning the skills along the way to do that,” says Ganim. “Ideally, it’s not about the end product they end up with out of workshop; it’s more about realizing they’re not just subject to what’s available on the market. It creates this interesting closed loop system where they’re both designer and end user. That is very powerful.”