Reflections on First Semester, Part 3

In which I really don't know what to think of Design Nature.

Reflections on First Semester, Part 2

This post is a look back at the past semester of Anthropology.

Reflections on First Semester, Part 1

In order to look back on the past semester in some kind of organized manner, I'm going to split this post (and all following ones) up by class/activity. This post is about ModSim and ModCon.

This is a Tale of Maggie Gibbon

Once upon a time, there was a gibbon named Maggie who lived happily in the southeast Asian jungles. Then, however, a developer arrived in the jungle and planned to cut it down. Maggie wanted to save her jungles, but she wasn't sure how. Then she noticed that the workers left the keys to their truck in the open while they took a break. Now, Maggie was unusual -- she had been born with magnetic feet! So her plan was to swing through the jungle, pick up the keys while the workers were away, and save her forest!

Between 11:59 pm on Tuesday and 12:01 am on Wednesday, Team Gibbon concluded that Maggie the Magnetic Gibbon was incapable of swinging, and she transformed into Maggie the Macho Gibbon, who was captured and wants to escape, so she's doing pull-ups while holding dumbbells with her feet in order to get strong enough to escape.

The transformation was a little like Cinderella, except not at all.

Last night was Transporter Night, I ate too much because upperclassmen are the nicest ever and bring wonderful food to the studios, and I did not get anywhere near enough sleep.

Look, a Gibbon!

Team Gibbon has a functional prototype! On monkey bars!

Well, for some definition of functional. Some parts of it are pretty fragile, and it's rather difficult to control, but all the components work, and it is capable of swinging! Its legs also move up and down so that it can pick up items with its feet (which have magnets). The leg movement is the best-working part of the gibbon.

Here is the frame of our second prototype (on bottom) beside the frame of the first prototype (on top):

ModSim: Green Edition

Unintentionally, both my second and third ModSim projects ended up relating to sustainability or green technology!

My second project was on passive freezers. That was a pretty stressful project. The physics was fun because I like thermodynamics, but my partner and I had lots of code problems. We ended up printing the poster two and a half hours before it was due. We had to record a six minute presentation, and we had to do three takes in under an hour.

Given how tight everything was at the end, the poster didn't turn out too badly!

Building a Passive Freezer: Taking an Active Stance on the Environment

Class Update

I wrote about the current state of Design Nature (though since then, I found out that I'm on team Gibbon for the next project!), but I haven't mentioned recently how things are going in my other classes. Summaries of recent events in each class are below the fold!

When Hoppers Hop (or not)

The halfway point of last semester was last Wednesday. It's on the academic calendar, marked as the 33rd day. For freshmen, though, the real halfway point was not Wednesday but Thursday: Hopper Demo Day.

For several days, the studios had been set up for the demos. There was a table in the middle of the room with a black Delrin (plastic) square on it, off of which we would launch our hoppers. A tape measure ran from the table to the ceiling so that on Demo Day we'd be able to measure how high our hopper jumped. There was another tape measure on the table to find horizontal displacement of hoppers.

Before demo-ing, we all had to turn in two spreadsheets. The first kept track of all the Delrin we had used through our prototypes. The second and more interesting spreadsheet asked for the mass of our hopper, its name, and the amount of energy it stored. (Project specs said that energy could be at most three joules). That information was all put into a different spreadsheet which the NINJAs filled out as we demo-ed our hoppers. That spreadsheet had columns for whether or not the trigger worked, whether or not the hopper stayed in one piece, vertical displacement, horizontal displacement, and any other notes.

All we needed in class for Demo Day was our hopper, a print-out of our original design goal, something to write on, and a pen. The instructor handed out a sheet with everyone's names for us to evaluate each others' hoppers. First, we evaluated the challenge level of a person's design goal -- how ambitious were they? Then, we evaluated the extent to which the hopper met the design goal, ranging from "Not at all" to "Nailed it!"

Whispers and the Occasional Private Message

In other words, teaching assistant adventures!

This summer, I had a job as a grader and a problem writer for Art of Problem Solving (AoPS). AoPS teaches online math and programming classes to students who need or want more challenging material than is available in school, and they also teach some very good math competition prep classes. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from AoPS, and now in addition to grading and problem writing, I'm assisting in classes!

I'm TA-ing two classes: a Pre-algebra 1 section with about 55 students, and an Intro Geometry section with between 35 and 40 students. In both classes I'm one of two TAs, and we usually split up the students by username. For example, in Pre-algebra, I answer the questions of kids with usernames starting with the letters M-Z.

Parts! (And An Experimental Prototype)

The past two or so weeks of Design Nature have mostly involved SolidWorks, a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software. If you walked through the dorms or the studios at almost any hour, you'd find freshmen CAD-ing. First there was the motion analysis, where we CAD-ed a very simple version of our hopper and used the Solidworks motion simulation software to get a guess for how high our hopper would hop. Then there was the solid model, which involved CAD-ing and assembling all the parts of our hopper to get something that looked like our intended prototype.

My laser cut parts! There's another piece exactly like the little one, but it was already part of the in-progress hopper when I took this picture.

Math Prize for Girls, Part 2

After the awards ceremony, the group of Mathcampers went back to Random for a while, and on the walk there, I had the chance to talk to Stephen Wolfram. His daughter was competing, and she’s MC12, so he was trying to figure out when we were doing what and where we were going to be. We talked a little bit about Olin (evidently he was on campus a couple of years ago), which was really cool. Once we got to Random, GW, who lives there and was MC ’09, ’10, ’12 and RSI ’11, gave a tour to the people who hadn’t spent much time in Random. I sat in the kitchen with Brigitte on her floor and did some Art of Problem Solving grading.

We met in Lobby 7 at 5:45 and gathered a group of around 30 Mathcampers to go to Bertucci’s, a pizza place. I got to talk to some people I haven’t seen for a while, and I had a really good calzone. We definitely made good use of the Round Table Theorem (if there are n people seated around a table, there is always room for an n+1^st person).

Math Prize for Girls, Part 1

This weekend was the fourth annual Math Prize for Girls competition, which is a math competition for middle and high school girls. Students qualify for the competition based on AMC scores from the previous year. I participated in the first three years of the competition, and this year I was very excited that the competition was held at MIT because I was able to volunteer!

There are several ways to get into Boston from Olin. The easiest way is to drive, but then you have to park, which isn’t as simple. Most people take either the T (Boston’s subway system) or the commuter rail. Olin isn’t conveniently located for any of the stations, though. It’s between a mile and a half and two miles from four different commuter rail stations, and there’s a T station about five miles away. I walked to one of the commuter rail stations. It’s also pretty normal for emails to go out on a list called helpme asking for rides.

I left Olin on Friday afternoon and walked to the Wellesley Hills commuter rail station, which is a twenty or twenty-five minute walk from the West Hall dorms. I took the train all the way to its last stop – South Station. I’m really familiar with South Station because the silver line from the airport runs there. When I got off the train and walked into South Station, I had to try really hard to contain my excitement. It was so familiar and comfortable, and I was that much closer to Cambridge.

I spent the summer of 2011 doing research in Cambridge , which is across the Charles River from Boston and is home to both MIT and Harvard. This was through a camp called Research Science Institute, or RSI. I lived on the MIT campus, so I know it and the area surrounding it very well. Even though I had no interest in MIT, I have lots of friends there, there are certain spots on campus that I love, and I have favorite restaurants and stores throughout Cambridge. Going back to Cambridge for the first time since last February felt like going home.

Empanadas, Medical Interpreters, and Design

My past two Anthropology classes have been longer than normal -- three hours on Friday and nearly four hours on Monday. Long classes are often long and annoying, but these weren't.

These were field trips!

On Friday we went into the Jamaica Plain area of Boston and spent two hours walking around a mainly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. It's historically Dominican, but a lot of the people with whom we interacted were Cuban. We split into groups, but various people went into stores and looked around, found community playgrounds and gardens, got haircuts, and ate yummy food. I did several of those, but by far the most exciting was the yummy food.

We ate at El Oriental de Cuba, which is a pretty well known restaurant in the area. One of the few customers in the restaurant when we were there -- we were in the restaurant between eleven and noon, before most people eat lunch -- told us that she and her friends go there a lot for both the food and the community. I really like Cuban food, so I was pretty excited. Well, okay, my experience with Cuban food in general is pretty limited, but I'm a big fan of empanadas.

Una Conversación Oblonga

I've thought since my first year of Mathcamp that mealtime conversations are some of the best indicators of how I fit in a group of people. At Mathcamp and my high school, I loved the interesting (and often highly amusing) conversations at lunch and supper, and my mealtime conversations with people at Candidates' Weekend gave me a better feel for the Olin community and for the other potential members of my class than almost anything else. In the end, the sense of the Olin people that I got while sitting in the dining hall was a big factor in my decision to come to Olin. They seemed like my kind of people.

My expectations for mealtime conversations have been completely met, and starting this past Tuesday, the conversations have grown even more entertaining, at least three times a week. Tuesday was the first meeting of Por Supuesto, the Spanish conversation co-curricular.

Co-curriculars are student activities at Olin that are organized by faculty, and they count for non-degree credit. (That means they don't help students graduate, but they are on transcripts.) They don't have to have any academic nature, though some do, and many repeat year after year. Por Supuesto is one of the oldest co-curriculars, occurring every fall, and it is currently run by Oscar, a Puerto Rican electrical engineering professor who is also one of my ModCon teachers.

Por Supuesto lends itself to being the kind of activity that students do year after year. It doesn't get boring or repetitive because it's talking to and hanging out with people. That means that lots of students do Por Supuesto during all four years of Olin, so the Por Supuesto members really get to know each other, and there's definitely a Por Supuesto culture of sorts. This year, half of the students are seniors, there are no juniors, and then there are some sophomores and six freshmen. Not everyone comes to every meal -- I don't know how we'd seat that many people -- but people come when they can to eat, speak Spanish, and laugh. 

Felt Instead of Heard

"Dancing is a language that is felt instead of heard."
-- Prince Eric in the Disney musical The Little Mermaid

Today was the second part of my audition for the Babson Dance Ensemble.

 One of my friends has what I consider to be the perfect audition blog post. It's general enough to have applied to multiple auditions for her, but it also says everything that really needs to be said. So, I'll get to the details later, but here's the most important part, with thanks to Rach:

"My line wasn’t the best, I wasn’t always with the music, I didn’t have the best technique, my extensions weren’t the highest, I didn’t stay on relevé the longest, my turns weren’t the cleanest... But I worked as hard as I could. And furthermore, I had fun with it, because I love to dance. And hopefully the way I danced at that audition conveyed that to the judges."

A Hopping Deficiency

 The first project in Design Nature is to build a hopping toy based on an insect. There are lots of insects that jump with astonishing acceleration, resulting in very high jumps. The insects that most Olin students choose to use as models are click beetles and froghoppers. I'm going the froghopper route.

Our assignment due Monday at midnight is to come up with five design ideas. This has, to this point, been deeply frustrating for me. I'm having trouble coming up with ideas, and then I wonder if my ideas are different enough to count as different ideas. Was my design goal too ambitious? How do I actually achieve something like the mechanism I claim to be imitating? Are my designs too simple? What if I'm not including enough detail? What more detail can there be?

In short, I'm panicking a little about this, but I'm also trying very hard to figure it out on my own -- maybe to too great an extent. It might have helped me to go talk to one of the Design Nature NINJAs. I currently have two designs drawn, and I have another one that I'm going to draw tonight. That still leaves two more. I'm lacking in ideas for hoppers.

So far, ModSim has been largely programming and difference equations, and I'm familiar with both of those. I wrote an entire post about ModCon and Electric Circuits. I've never studied anthropology before, but none of the ideas have particularly surprised me, and I'm used to writing about readings. That makes Design Nature my hardest class.

Clubs!

Friday afternoon was club fair! What this means at Olin is that all the clubs set up tables around the center of campus (the Oval), and the freshmen wander from table to table, talking to upperclassmen, eating food, trying things out, and signing up for more and more mailing lists.

I didn't come off too badly (by which I mean that my email won't be horridly flooded on a daily basis). I had already joined Olin Dance Project, the contra dance group, and WHACK (the weapons club, and they had foils at their table and it made the foilist in me very happy), but at the club fair I also signed up for Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF), Midnight Mathematicians, Fiber Arts, Stage Combat, Franklin W. Olin Players (FWOP, that's theater), and then I was convinced to join the Olin Opera Organization! We'll see how that goes. I'm also planning on going to TARDIS -- that's the Doctor Who club -- events, but I'll know when all of those are from Carine.

The club events continued after the fair, though. SWE had a meeting last night, complete with lots and lots of cheesecake. They talked about what kinds of events they do, tried to convince us all to go to the national conference -- why are engineering conferences so much more expensive than math conferences? -- and what fundraisers they do. And we ate cheesecake. Lots of fun. Today was the second TARDIS meeting, though the first I've been able to attend, and we all crowded into a dorm room and ate food, drank Coke, and watched today's Doctor Who episode. "Dinosaurs. In a spaceship!" That basically expresses all the awesomeness.

Everything is Math. Right?

At least, almost everything is math, according to my advising family.

Olin tries to provide a lot of support for students through a variety of channels. Perhaps the most obvious academic support is through advisors. Each advisor has between ten and a dozen advisees, and the advisor and advisees form an advising family. My advisor is a math professor, Aaron. This is only his third year here, and one's first few groups of advisees tend to larger than normal, so this -- combined with the fact that some of the very math-y people have transferred into Aaron's advising family -- means that there was only one slot in the family for a freshman.

A week and a half ago during orientation, the freshmen had lunch with their advisors. I had a good conversation with Aaron, but being his only first-year advisee then felt pretty weird. Today was the first advising family meeting, and it was awesome. The upperclassmen had a dynamic with each other and with Aaron, and I could just slide into that and find my place. Even better -- and I'm not sure if this was the Office of Student Life being awesome or if it's largely thanks to transfers -- Aaron has a very math-y advising family, to the point that he said we should discuss all the non-math business first then get to the math discussions. A group of people in which math is all on its own as an important topic of conversation? Oh, yes, I'll take that.

No Model Is Right, But Some Models Are Useful

In other words, I love ModSim.

Today, we started in the auditorium, but then we went to the studios where we were assigned to groups for our first project. The groups are of four people each, and the ModSim instructors (and probably NINJAs) assembled the groups using the surveys we turned in about our experience in various areas. I'm in a group with three guys: Roland, Guillaume, and Geoffroy. (Yes, that's how it's spelled in French, at least traditionally. Promise.)

There were four ideas that the instructors had given us for our projects, and my group chose the suggestion about education. We're looking at the percent of children in Uganda who finish primary school and how social inertia impacts that. In other words, we're going to make and analyze a lot of graphs involving percent of children finishing primary school, number of educated adults, drop-out rate, and time. Today we were just sketching out our ideas -- where do we want to go, what's a basic stock and flow diagram, and what sorts of graphs do we expect will be on our poster?

The general advice for modeling is to start simple. It's hard to know what the right balance is. How simple is too simple to actually do useful work? But a model can also be too complicated to even really begin to get something with which to do useful work. I think our group encountered those problems today. What needed to be a stock? What could just be a source or sink? Upon what did all of these flows depend? What factors did we want to consider? What data did we have -- because after all, if there's no data, we can't really build the factor into our model?

At the end of class, we were talking with one of the other groups who had chosen the education topic. We had a lot of the same ideas, but their proposed model was rather different from ours. That was interesting and, I thought, pretty cool. It also led to Roland stating the quote in the title.

I Can't Believe I'm Writing This

Today was my first Modeling and Control (ModCon) lab. It wasn't a hard lab, but there was lots that could go wrong, and it seemed like everything did. There were also lots of students who hadn't worked with circuits before, which complicated things. (One of my friends from high school would have scolded me for helping other people before doing my own work.)

I not only had Electricity and Magnetism in high school but also a circuits class (EC, for Electric Circuits), and today reminded me of the EC labs. As I thought more about it, though, I realized that the ModCon lab today had very little in common with EC labs, other than the material and the circuit debugging. Eventually I realized that it wasn't so much that ModCon was reminding me of EC -- it was making me miss EC.

Anyone who spent much time with me during spring semester of my senior year will know that EC was my most frustrating class. Modern Physics 2 was my hardest, but EC was the one that took by far the most time. I had trouble with the labs and was a bit behind, then missed something like eight hours of lab while on a college visit. For weeks I was the first person into the lab on Monday afternoons, and I started going in on Tuesday mornings as well. The work outside of lab wasn't as frustrating, but there was plenty of it. I complained about EC more than any of my other courses.

I never thought I would hear myself say that I miss EC. It would have seemed absurd, but I'm also not as surprised as I should be.

Brave

In thirty minutes, two things which, for me at least, constitute being brave.

First, I went to a field to sketch insects. Next, I asked someone if she'd like to go see the Boston Ballet with me.

Neither one of those seems like particularly hard things, right? But I'm pretty squeamish about insects, and I'm shy.

Weekend Adventures

Last night, there were two important events. There was a party at 9:00 Wellesley to which Olin students were invited. However, also at 9:00 was the premiere of the new season of Doctor Who. Olin's TARDIS club was watching the Doctor Who premiere. Bunches of freshmen were going to Wellesley.

What to do, what to do...

Phoenix Blue

Last night, I noticed two men walking past one of the outer parking lots at Olin. It looked like they were just out on a nightly walk through the area -- lots of people walk near campus -- and I had to wonder what they thought.

You see, in that parking lot, there were Oliners dancing with fire.

Last night was the first Burn of the year. One of Olin's most distinctive groups is OFAC, Olin Fire Arts Club. The shortest possible description is that they dance with fire. In more detail, OFAC members have various apparatus that can be lit on fire in certain locations, and they swing and spin these apparatus around in the air in time to music.

OFAC Burns are astonishing, captivating, and nothing short of beautiful.

When the performers spin fire -- whether the fire is on spheres at the end of chains or on a hula hoop or on the ends of a stick or a pole -- you see the bright, flaring yellow of the gold, and it's like the fire itself is dancing. The idea is not the shapes the apparatus make but rather the shapes the fire makes. It is not the fire on its own or the people on their own; it's truly people dancing with fire. Partners, giving weight, circling together as I would in a contra dance balance and swing.

My favorite part, though, is the blue.

How to Lose More than $80,000 in 35 Minutes

I am never going to make my living by making paper boxes.

Just so you know.

The only class I had today was Modeling and Simulation of the Physical World, or ModSim. Today we met in our studio sections, and once there, we split up into groups of four people. I'm in a group with my roommate (I'm going to call her Carine from this point forward), a boy who was in my Design Nature group yesterday, and another girl with the same name as my roommate.

On the table was a large piece of graph paper (really large -- about 30 inches by 27 inches) and an envelope. The instructions on the front of the envelope told us to choose a team name (we became Carine squared) then set a timer for 35 minutes. We then opened the envelope.

We were given tape, a ruler, scissors, and a task: make paper boxes.

First Day of Class

Hello!

I'm a freshman at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, or just Olin. Today was the first day of classes after five days of orientation.

All freshmen at Olin are automatically enrolled in three of their four classes. The most advertised of these, and the one about which I am both most excited and most nervous, is Design Nature. Olin puts a lot of focus on design, and Design Nature introduces freshmen to the design process (and the machine shop) immediately. It is centered around two main projects, an individual hopper based on a hopping insect and a team project based on an animal with a goal that varies by year. This year the team project is a transporter.

The other two required freshman fall classes are Modeling and Simulation of the Physical World (ModSim) and Modeling and Control (ModCon). ModSim is centered around modeling projects and tends more towards math, and ModCon is much more of a circuits class.

All freshmen also take an AHS foundation course. AHS stands for Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and it is pronounced like Oz. My AHS class is The Human Connection, which is an anthropology course with a focus on aging and religion. Most people call it Anthro.

Today, I had all of my classes except ModSim, which is tomorrow. I normally wouldn't have ModCon on Thursdays, but because lecture is on Mondays and Monday is Labor Day, all the freshmen had ModCon today.