Welcome to “Introduction to Engineering Concepts," a lesson that will introduce you to several STEM fields and help you build core skills that are helpful across many engineering disciplines. We also explain the engineering/research development process. This lesson assumes little to no prior engineering experience but does provide suggestions to increase the difficulty of the experiments should you desire to do so.
To accomplish these goals, we invited several subject matter experts from across MIT Lincoln Laboratory (LL) to discuss their involvement in interesting, topical projects. Our in-lesson experiments were inspired by three of these projects and demonstrate the real and varied possibilities of engineering:
- Filtration lab inspired by MIT LL’s study with Homeland Security on the spread of COVID in New York’s public transportation system (Biotechnology and Human Systems).
- Bluetooth tag lab derived from the Privacy Automated Contact Tracing (PACT) project (Cyber Security & Information Sciences).
- Clausewitzian chess lab is adopted from a MIT LL gamified multi-domain adaptive warfare study (Homeland Protection).
Most importantly, we ask you to bring your personal expression to the experiments in this lesson. Engineering is an art and like any art, everyone brings their own perspective and ideas.
How does this lesson work?
This lesson is asynchronous, so you can start it at any point and work through it on your own time. We encourage you to work in groups of 2–3 with your friends for the experiments but this is optional. All three experiments can be done with one person.
What will you learn in this lesson?
After completing this lesson, you will…
- Have a general understanding of engineering and the many ways engineering is applied to form related fields
- Be familiar with the engineering process
- Be able to apply the engineering process to solve current, relevant problems that interest you
This lesson is supported in part by a grant received from the MIT Community Service Fund.
