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.


It's odd because, in a way, Design Nature is a huge part of why I was interested in and applied to Olin. I wanted a degree that had lots of design in the curriculum and had it early, and in a way my expectation of that began at Olin. The amount of focus Olin put on design influenced how I looked at my other college choices; I wanted that design focus. At one point during the admissions process, I thought that, once at Olin, I might even end up as an Engineering:Design major instead of a MechE major.

At no point did I stop and think about the fact that I've never done any product design and haven't built much of anything, either. Now, both of those are terrifying, because so quickly I have to come up with five designs based on the design goal I wrote, which was probably simultaneously too hand-wavy and too detailed.

That's not the only way in which this is scaring me, though. I'm so clearly uncomfortable with this, and then I walk into ModSim and see difference equations, and they're almost relaxing. I was so excited and happy that I had a math-y advising family. I'm looking forward to Midnight Math meetings and the Putnam exam prep sessions. I had a lot of fun doing math with Aaron for seventy-five minutes on Friday to see if I could place out of Linearity 1 (the answer is yes, by the way), and my journal is currently full of graph theory.

I've been an engineer among mathematicians for years. In high school I was definitely a math person, but I was also a mechanical engineer among electrical engineers and computer programmers. I'm not used to be a mathematician among engineers, and that's really confusing at this point.

A note on subjects not included in this post:
I did go back to Christ Church today, and the opening hymn was "O, For a Thousand Tongues To Sing!" My hymn-induced happiness only increased when the closing hymn was "Lord, Whose Love Through Humble Service," which is sung to Beach Spring, one of my favorites.
Yes, part 2 of the Babson Dance Ensemble audition was today. I'll talk more about auditions after part 1 on Tuesday, but it went well! Now I'm hoping Tuesday goes equally well.