Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 1 2-hour session, 3 1-hour final presentation session
Labs: Variable hours / week for 4 weeks
Course Objective
The objective of the course is to enable students through a team-based hands-on product design experience to:
- Learn the process of design, based on the scientific method, to combine creative thinking with engineering principles (physics) to turn ideas into robust reality:
- Identify a problem (opportunity!).
- Use fundamental principles and appropriate analysis and experiments to select and develop ideas.
- Generate & create strategies for solving the problem.
- Generate & create concepts for implementing the strategy.
- Break the concept into modules and develop the most critical module first.
- Complete the detailed design of the modules.
- Manufacture, test, debug, and modify the design.
- Document the results on a web page and make a professional quality presentation to a group of peers and visiting company representatives.
- Become familiar with the fundamental issues and applications of basic mechanical components and manufacturing and assembly techniques.
- Learn how to manage projects to be “on-time” and “on-budget” and to maintain a high degree of professional ethics.
This Year’s Theme
In response to student feedback, we have spread 2.971 out over IAP, without increasing the total hours required, and we have also enhanced training in the shops with the inclusion of a short introductory project that each student will complete, and thereby be primed for this year’s theme: Games and Puzzles! In addition, teams have generally been formed along the lines of student’s technical interests, so the challenge for each team is to create an appropriate game or puzzle. The game or puzzle can be any combination of mechanical, electrical, or software elements. It just must be realistically completable within the time frame of the course!
Each team has a TOTAL budget of $250 for your project. FOOD will not be reimbursed.
Solid Modeling and Best Model Contest
Each student is expected to download SolidWorks? or Pro/ENGINEER? from the MIT web and learn it using the on-line tutorials! The TAs can be very helpful!
Grading
- This is very much an interactive course, and you will increase your chance of passing if you attend group meetings and pull your own weight. This is a very demanding course, but the rewards are very high in terms of not just getting a summer job at a sponsoring companies, but getting real responsibility in your summer job. The design problem solving methods you can learn can furthermore help you in your other classes.
- To pass this course, you need to stay on schedule (carefully read and memorize the schedule attached to the syllabus!) and meet the milestones! If you are in 8.01L or 18.01A, then make sure your teammates know it, and the team should pick a project that is doable for the amount of effort that will be available!
- Each student MUST have a design notebook, in which you keep ALL your notes and scribbles. A spiral bound notebook will suffice into which you can also paste printouts from the Internet etc. These notebooks will be EXTREMELY important to bring to your company interviews in the spring!
- Each team must create a website, and email the URL to the Instructor by the deadline! Each team must update their website daily (just a summary sheet or two is fine). These summary sheets then become your presentation slides (TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE!!!)
Lectures
Only one lecture for a duration of two hours. Final presentation will be three weeks later for a duration of three hours, followed by the celebration luncheon at the faculty club.
Labs and Safety
2.971 students will be divided into 6 teams, and this year the teams are split in terms of members who receive training in each of the two main shops. Teams are encouraged to create their products from components built in each shop. Teams are required to present their ideas to the shop gurus for reality checks and feedback! All teams have access to the Edgerton Lab for electronics help. Of course students will be directed to whatever shop has the appropriate tools for the task!
You MUST wear safety goggles or safety glasses (polycarbonate eyeglasses are fine) and closed-toed shoes at ALL times in the shops.
Mandatory shop training, where you learn safety and machine operation by building a small project, will occur in each of the shops on 4 days (you must attend all 4 days!) for 3 hours for those in the Edgerton Shop. For those in the Hobby Shop, there are two groups, which meet for 2 hours on either two consecutive Wednesdays or Fridays. Please see the following table for your assignment below:
Quizzes
There are no formal quizzes.
Text Book
There is no textbook for the course; however, course notes are provided for you to review, which will help you become familiar with design process and fundamental principles. READ THEM the first week of class!
Design Notebooks
An engineer should keep a detailed bound notebook for invention date establishment. No scrap paper! Each student is responsible for getting a design notebook (spiral notebook is sufficient for the purposes of this course). Each student MUST carry their design notebooks with them, and put all scribblings in it etc…IT IS YOUR CREATION DIARY, and you will be asked to show it at your interview!
Milestone Reports/Final Presentation
Each team will make a final PowerPoint presentation to the class and visitors, followed by a celebration luncheon in the faculty club. A laptop projector will be available as well as a video player if needed. The presentation will have the following format:
Slide 1: Team name, student members (individual or group picture with everyone’s names so someone can tell who is who!) and TAs AND define the theme area for your team (e.g., a sports device) (Milestone 1)
Slide 2: Describe the problem you set out to solve (show the different product strategies considered) (e.g., baseball, football) (Milestone 2)
Slide 3: Show results of Rohrbach (Peer Review Evaluation Process [PREP]) and brainstorming process, and your top selected strategy (the product area, e.g., baseball) (Milestone 2)
Slide 4: Show results of Rohrbach (PREP) and brainstorming process, and your top one or two concepts (the hardware ideas, e.g., pitching, or batting machine). Ideally, each person has created a solid model of their own favorite concept, and the slide shows each persons’ solid model, as well as the final solid model of the best evolved concept (Milestone 3)
Slide 5: Show experiments or other things you did to help select the “best concept” (e.g., we are developing a human powered pitching machine) (Milestone 4)
Slide 6: Show the final concept (solid model and sketch model) (Milestone 5)
Slide 7: Show the development of the concept (analysis, sketches, models, machining the parts etc) (Milestone 6)
Slide 8: Show the finished product! (Milestone 7)
Slide 9: Show the testing of the product (Milestone 8)
Slide 10: Results (how well it worked? Cost-to-produce estimate) (Milestone 8)
Slide 11: Conclusions: Is this product worth developing for the mass market? Anything else? (Milestone 8)
In order to pass the course, each team MUST hand the Instructor a CD or zip drive with their presentation!
As mentioned above, your summary sheets describing how you met your milestones can be used to form the basis of your presentations!
Bring the draft versions of these slides to your meetings with the Instructor! We will resolve any open issues at the meeting so that by the end of the day the milestone (and its summary slide which is also part of your presentation) is DONE and posted on the team website.
The presentation will thus write itself!
