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.

 In Anthro we spent a lot of time going over the syllabus and the books we're going to read. Once we finished that, the prof gave us all copies of an old article about the Nacirema people. Of the fifteen students, five of us had read the article before and knew the punchline (Nacirema is American backwards), so she grouped us together, and we were able to talk about slightly different things than the other groups, since we didn't spend as much time reading and already knew that it was a satire.

ModCon, with all eighty-some-odd of us, was held in the auditorium. I'm used to this kind of lecture class because my senior year history class was held in a lecture hall with sixty-three students. The professor first introduced the teaching team and the NINJAs, or course assistants, and then he talked about how ModCon, Design Nature, and ModSim all fit in the process of engineering. After that, he showed us a breadboard with all but one of the main labs we'll be doing in ModSim on it, and he showed us all the cool things we'll be doing. After a break, we started on some basic circuit analysis. Those of us who had E&M or any other circuit experience had seen the material before, because it was just some very simple circuits with resistors and voltage sources.

Design Nature was also held in the auditorium. Design Nature began with an introduction of the teaching team and the NINJAs, and then we split off into our studio sections. When we reached the studios, we were split into groups and given a project. We had to build a body-o-meter, something to measure growth, for children using Legos that were provided. We had thirty minutes and could use no more than 25 Lego pieces.
I was one of five people on my team. Our first step was to brainstorm. What could we measure? The height of the child was not an option, with only 25 Lego pieces. Feet, hands, and fingers would all work. We thought about wrists, then decided the round element would cause problems.
Next, we went outside into the hallway to look at the types of Legos available. A lot of the teams had immediately gone outside, so we were one of the last groups to go look at the materials. Once we had seen all the Legos, we met back inside the studio to come up with a design. We decided to measure feet, and we came up with a design somewhat modeled off of the tools for measuring feet in shoe stores. When we went back out into the hallway, we first built a very simple version, not using very many pieces. We realized that the body-o-meter wasn't very stable, so we increased the stability. We added some outside wheels to keep the portion that rolled on the track, and which wheels to use was something with which we experimented for quite a while.
 After thirty minutes, we were told to reflect on the design process. We answered some questions about the order in which we had done things, what had worked, and what we could have done better. Then we drew a flow chart of our design process, and we were asked to share two key insights with the class. We first said that our iterations were very important. We started with a simple design and then made lots of improvements based on the weaknesses of the product. Our second insight was something we could have done better. We thought our weakness as a team had been division of labor and communication of what each person was doing. While it didn't really matter in this project, in a larger project it would.
All the students met back in the auditorium to talk more about the design  process, specifically iteration and in which situations it is better to pursue several ideas simultaneously than pursue one idea in a focused manner.

Something I thought was especially cool about today: I met a Wellesley student! There's a Wellesley sophomore in Design Nature, and she's in my studio section. She wasn't in my group for the design activity, but we talked while walking back to the auditorium, and she sat beside me for the end of class.

Tomorrow my only class is ModSim, but I also need to review some differential equations and linear algebra and do some of my homework for next week.