Principles of engineering CLASS NINJA

I've been a NINJA (Need information now? Just ask!) for a couple of classes at Olin-- SCOPE, Systems, and now, Principles of Engineering (PoE).  There were 3 sections of PoE with over 80 students in total (the student body at Olin is only 340+). PoE is a great class because it teaches you lessons you'll need to remember as an engineer: integration is hard and takes time, don't bite off more than you can chew, and there's never enough time or enough money. It's also a great class because it gets people familiar with rapid prototyping techniques and microcontroller technologies (Arduino).

With more than a fifth of the school, I wanted to make sure that we taught useful skills like good documentation practices, methods for giving constructive feedback in technical design reviews in addition to technical, hands-on experience in fabrication and design.

Here is a couple of projects that I helped to advise.

Stairpeggio was inspired by an idea I pitched to the class-- turning a staircase into a keyboard, similar to what was done here.

HennaBot built a 4 degree-of-freedom gantry that could take a design drawn on the computer and duplicate that on the detected hand.

Team Redacted built an intuitive control and feedback Prosthetic Arm for below-the-elbow amputees. They use force sensors on the fingertips of the 3D printed hand and an arduino to process the signals and give user feedback through tightening an armband.