SCOPE Week 25: Old SCOPE Supplies

Someone did some clean-up/reorganizing at Olin recently and found several boxes of old SCOPE things, so Rebecca, the SCOPE Director, brought the boxes around to the relevant teams. The BoSci materials that were found were marked "STENTS" and consisted of two long tubes in plastic bags.

When Rebecca came by, she said, "I brought you more stents!" assuming that something marked with "STENTS" would contain stents. We pulled the plastic wrap off and looked inside the two tubes and were disappointed to find them empty, at which point we realized there was something wrapped around the tubes, and maybe that was the important part.

It was a diffracting white sheet of some kind of polymer. We're not really sure what it was for, but we had fun throwing it around to watch it float, wearing it as a cape, and making it do diffraction-y things. We also think we know which BoSci project it was from. One year, BoSci sponsored multiple projects, and so the teams were identified by general topics, polymers and stents. We believe the tube was marked "STENTS" because it was for the Stents Team.

SCOPE Stories 24: Graphing and Goals

I looked at one of my teammates today and said, "I feel like I've been doing the same thing for the past three weeks."

"Graphing?"

"Graphing."

We got eight more stents worth of data today (and still might get a few more). We also got updated information on stents whose data we'd sorted through last week. It turns out that some of the parameter values we were given were target values, not actual ones, and the actual values were quite different. So today was a day of redoing some of our previous data analysis, doing new data analysis, and trying to draw conclusions so that we can write the report.

Not all of the models are going to be in a great place at the end, but at this point the hope is that we'll be able to diagnose ways in which they're wrong. If we can say that Model B is making incorrect predictions for a certain quantity because of too strong a dependence on a particular parameter, then we'll be in an okay place. It would be even better to be able to come up with a list of dependencies (essentially power laws or something similar) so that someone else would have a better place to start in developing a model.

SCOPE Stories Week 23: A Very Long Stent

At one point today, Abe was very frustrated with his model and spent a long time trying to talk through the theory of it with Brian. About an hour later, he started laughing uncontrollably. It turned out that instead of modeling a 7.5 cm stent, he was modeling a 75 cm stent.

We have more data! Some of it's a bit weird, though, so we're still sorting through it. The hope is that we'll be in a good place with the data and the models by the end of Sunday.

Four Years of Curriculum Changes

I recently posted about the changes to the first year curriculum while I've been at Olin. There have been a number of other key curriculum changes over the course of my four years here, though, and I wanted to discuss those as well.

SCOPE Stories Week 22.5: Wait, the Models are Working?

This past Wednesday, I was really frustrated about having errors in our models and not knowing how to proceed. We redid some of our testing and analysis, though, and we're actually in much better shape than we expected. Our models are behaving and matching data pretty closely, and where they're not, we've figured out how to fix them.

We haven't gotten to check all of our models yet, but we're getting a lot closer, and I'm feeling a lot better about what we're going to be able to deliver to Boston Scientific at the end.

We have a weekly Sunday meeting, and I was kind of dreading it today because I was so unhappy with the state of the models. But this meeting turned out to be quite exciting!

SCOPE Stories Week 22: A Modest Amount of Data

We have a little bit of data, which means we can start verifying our models! And by verifying our models, I mostly mean scrambling to try to find missing factors of two and trying to resolve a few more fundamental errors. I feel like I've been banging my head against a brick wall all afternoon.

Sigh.

In happier news, we pretty much have one of our posters done, we're making good progress on our report, and our user interface has pretty much all the features we want! The user interface being very functional has been helpful for all the comparisons of models to data that we've been doing, especially as I've played with changing things in the model...

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.