Sometimes It's Obvious We're Engineers

Words Oliners are more likely than other college students to use in everyday conversation

Abstraction: Life is complicated and hard to model accurately. Let's get rid of some of the finicky details; we can add them back in later if they're important.

Assumptions: What are we making simpler than reality? What aren't we making simpler? Let's make sure everyone knows, because without assumptions, there's no context. State your assumptions early and often.

Complexity: Complex things are interesting. They also tend to be messy.

Claim: If we formally state what we believe to be true, then everyone is on the same page.

Design: Before we build something or make something happen, we plan, and we think a lot about those plans.

Feedback: Something happens, and it causes a change in how it happens in the future. There are two slightly different ways we use this term, and I'm not sure which is more common. We describe the world in terms of positive and negative feedback loops We also provide and want written and verbal feedback on everything.

Thoughts on Sophomore Year Math Activities

It's earlier than I normally start writing reflection posts, but this one covers the entire school year, not just this semester, and everything is in project mode now. This is all about math related things -- NINJAing, online assisting, graph theory, and Putnam!

Build a World of Foam

The third phase of UOCD is called "Develop." At this point, we have one or two ideas, and we're supposed to narrow down to one and take it all the way to a final model and a product poster. That final model is generally some form of a looks-like prototype. In class last Thursday, we talked about how to make that model.

The answer is lots and lots of foam and foam-core.

Two speakers came to class and talked to us in the auditorium. One was a designer at Continuum, and he showed us lots of pictures of various parts of Continuum's design process and of some of the models and prototypes they've built. Something that was really interesting for my team was seeing that they had built full-size models of hotel lobbies or restaurants out of foam-core and foam for a couple of projects. If we choose to go with the Puzzle Cafe, something like that is an option. (We've talked about maybe turning our workspace into part of the Puzzle Cafe.)

The part of class that I found more exciting, though, was when Beth Sullivan talked to us and did demonstrations. She's a well-known model maker in this part of the country, so she was mostly showing us how to work with foam and foam-core. This doesn't seem like it should be that complicated; we did a lot of work with foam-core for sketch models in Design Nature, and we've been making simple representations out of blue foam since Candidates' Weekend. The difference is knowing how to work with a material and knowing how to work well with it. We want the representations we do in this phase to be clean and accurate, so Beth talked to us about the grain of foam core, using a rabbit tool (which helps with nice corners in 3D objects), and how to cut basically anything out of blue foam using a hot wire cutter.

A lot of us left saying things like, "Can we be her when we grow up?" Beth was a lot of fun, and I felt like watching someone work with the hot wire cutter to make models of everything from a crinkle cut french fry to a hair dryer was really useful. When I heard people last year talking about this class period, I think what I heard was the 'in the auditorium the entire time' bit and not the 'but it was super awesome' bit, so I was really surprised to enjoy this session as much as I did.

Future Adventures!

I know what I'm doing this summer and next fall!

Over the summer, I'll be one of about two dozen students doing engineering research at the National University of Singapore as part of the SERIUS program. My project is in the chemical engineering department with Prof. Praveen Linga's group; I'll be working on dissociation of methane from methane gas hydrates using carbon dioxide.

I'm also studying away next fall! I'll be in Budapest at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. I've known about BSM for a long time, and I'll looking forward to spending one semester of lots of math! I won't know until a couple of weeks into the fall semester what classes I'll take, but I'm planning on taking a mix of combinatorics, algebra, and analysis as well as a Hungarian language course.

Imagine a World

Yesterday was the Phase 2 Design Review for UOCD, so I spent most of Wednesday (and a total of more than 22 hours over the past 6 days) in my team's corner of the design studio. There are many pictures and some description of what we've been doing below the fold!

Our space on Wednesday. We're going to reorganize it a little for the final phase, so there will be pictures of that next week!