Feedback and the Test Tube

One of the key features of Olin is its experimental status. Innovation in engineering education is a cornerstone of Olin. That means constantly identifying what could be better and attempting to improve it. Part of the way that we do that is through feedback.

Four Years Worth of First Year Curriculum Changes

One of the things I always emphasize to potential Olin students is that the curriculum is in flux. One of Olin's goals is essentially to be a testing place for new ideas and practices in engineering education. Participating in that experiment is part of being an Olin student.

With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to list ways in which Olin's curriculum has changed while I've been here. It turns out that the changes to the first year curriculum alone are quite extensive, so in this post I'll start with those.

Halfway Through

Four semesters down, four semesters to go.

I'm halfway through my education at Olin. When I started this blog, I intended to document my experience in the experiment that is Olin. So far, I've mostly done this course by course, and this seemed like a good point to stop and look over the past two years as a whole.

Reflections on Semester 4: The Entrepreneurial Initiative (FBE)

One of Olin's requirements is an entrepreneurship foundation course. Over the past decade, that course has taken a lot of forms. Last semester, the class was The Entrepreneurial Initiative, which everyone called FBE (left over from an old course title).

I went into FBE dreading it. I was taking it because it was a requirement and only because it was a requirement. That dread faded, but FBE was both frustrating and disappointing.

Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?

Beautiful Wood

Yesterday, I took a quick trip into Cambridge with my FBE team! I've been spending a lot of time off campus for projects recently, but most of those trips have been user visits for UOCD. We've been in teams for The Entrepreneurial Initiative for about a week, though, and my team needed to go to a woodworking store.

The Entrepreneurial Initiative is a required class, and it has changed a lot over the years; it seems like Olin has never been sure quite what form it should have. We shorten the name to FBE (pronounced 'fib-ee') because the course used to be called Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship, and the acronym stuck. In its current incarnation, the class is focused on starting a business in teams of about five.

All the students came up with product/project ideas, and we pitched them to each other. Based on those pitches, we formed teams. My team was formed from the merging of two project suggestions that were both pitched with the idea that we would make a simple product, not spend too much time on design details, and focus on learning basic marketing and finance.

After our first meeting, we decided that we would make wooden coasters. Part of what we're working on this week is design, since there's still some involved in the project, so we needed wood for prototyping. Three of us went into Cambridge to Rockler Woodworking. I didn't know all that much about wood, and I'd never been to a wood store before, but I enjoyed the trip a lot more than I expected I would. The employees were really helpful, and we got some beautiful wood for prototyping:

From left to right: white ash, zebra wood, padauk, walnut, and Bolivian rosewood

My favorite is the padauk, which is the red wood. Another wood I really liked (though we didn't end up buying any of it) was bocote.

The timing of this is pretty interesting. Because a lot of my UOCD users are people who design or make mechanical puzzles, I've been around a few woodworkers, and they've all talked about types of woods and how they choose them. If you'd asked me a month ago what I thought some themes of this semester would be, I would never have said wood, but it's been a really fun surprise.

A puzzle designed by one of my team's UOCD users. There's a lot of symmetry, including color/wood symmetry.