Education World

                Dented metal doors slide shut to the sound of a droning buzzer. The train is lurching forward before I can locate an open stretch of handrail, letting me careen down the aisle for a few seat lengths before swinging Rhesus Monkey-like into a somewhat stationary position. The subway is crowded, but I catch sight of my friends in the piercing fluorescence at the far side of the car.

Impossibly soon, the train is stopping, breaks groaning and its passengers waggling forward and back. My friends are the first ones out the door and I’m left squeezing past shoulders in pursuit. As I stumble over the notorious gap, my eyes dart across a dozen bold-lettered signs in primary colors, their arrows jutting in every direction. I don’t know how many subway lines could possibly connect here, but trains clatter and rumble all around. Tracks line up against tracks, with barely any platform to stand on. I can’t tell if its day or night; everything glares like washed out film of desert sun.

Dammit: My friends are already boarding the connecting train 20 meters down across the crowd. I lunge towards the nearest door, the drone already stunning me. I just make the train, but now it’s stopping again and I’m stepping out. This platform is right at track level, raising the burning lidded taillights of train cars looming overhead. I’m standing on the tracks now, the previous train pulling away with a dull clatter.

A conductor’s bell crashes through my attention– I jerk my head up towards an oncoming train. Panic explodes through me. I move to spring away, but it feels like a track start from underwater blocks, slow and unreactive. The train scrapes my trailing heel as I dodge, just as I see that I’ve sidestepped onto another track. This next train bears down on me even faster, but somehow my molasses-hung arms hook the side and I swing precariously onto some outer ledge of the car. Back pressed desperately to the cold metal, I am yanked forward. A passing train barrels past in front of me – I have to turn my head to save my face. The train to which I cling screeches suddenly to a stop. I lose my grip and fall forward on to one hand. My knees bang the concrete of a platform. Somehow I am in the same labyrinthine station. Train after train plows in, its doors slam open and shut like razor eyelids before it clatters out of the station. My head swivels from sign to train to tracks to sign, my mind grasping for traction.  I see the whip of a friend’s jacket cuff, beckoning me onto another train, but too far to reach at underwater pace before buzzer doors slam and roll away. I spin from door to door, trains on both sides of a platform shrinking to barely fit me between the flashing metal walls. The slamming doors come one after the next –gaping, slamming, rolling – their buzzers sound back to back now overlapping ‘til the dull drone becomes a solid constant whine, my head shaking back and forth from to train to train to train to train to train…

My head is rocking from ear to ear across my pillow in the dim light of my single dorm room. The mute blue grey of morning light across cream white walls and blue bedsheets diffuses in my blurred vision. I lurch forward, still dodging trains before I realize that I’m at Olin and it’s impossibly early.

I sink back onto the down pillow with a deep sigh. I heard no alarm; it’s not time to run, yet. One deep breath. I rub my feet between the warm sheets, nuzzle my pillow. Out of curiosity, my eyes wander down the length of my navy comforter to my clock radio. Its hard red digits glare through the greyness like the taillights of a subway. It is 8:55, and I have five minutes before a teleconference with senior management of a potential employer.

The impossibility of hesitation is startlingly clear. I roll forward out of bed. My knees bang the thin carpet of the bedroom floor. It feels like concrete, and I hear the closing doors begin to drone.

Source: Bennett

I’ve now been in Florence for more than two months. Today, of course, was one of the days where I was reminded more of my “Americanness” by the discussions of the election everywhere. Last night we actually went to an election party hosted by the Democrats Abroad, where we saw Italians wearing Obama masks, waving the stars and stripes, and declaring their love for America. It was somewhat strange.

(Photo thanks to Rebecca Olsen.)

While the election was fun, I was thoroughly exhausted for all of today. Staying up until 5AM to hear the final results was possibly a poor decision. Luckily, the most strenuous thing I have going for the next few days is to work in the photo lab. I’ve never done non-digital photo work before, but it’s something I’ve come to really enjoy. I even entered a few of my pieces in a student art show. These still have to be juried in, so I get to wait another two days for another (less historic) vote.

For the curious, the three photos I submitted are:

Hopefully they get picked. Fingers crossed!

-Jessi

Source: Jessi

In my Software Design class, the second half of the semester is devoted to a team project (I briefly mentioned it in my last post). Olin emphasizes incremental development; the idea is to always have a working program, rather than building out separate pieces and planning on tying them together at the end (you can read more about it in Professor Allen Downey’s textbook). With about a month left to finish, my team recently completed our first working prototype (of any usefulness).

So what is Pricecod? Our objective is to have an easily accessible way to quickly tell if an item a user sees in a store would be cheaper to buy online. Mobile applications - both native and web apps - are intriguing (and the hot area to work in) but we’re frustrated that most commercial applications require an expensive smart phone and/or a data plan. As such, we’re aiming to achieve our objective by building an application that, when users send a picture of a barcode from their cell phones, will text message them back with the cheapest prices and locations of that item online. (We know this app already exists - we’re doing it to learn, jeez) If users don’t have a camera on their cell phone, they could also send us the barcode number.

We don’t exactly have all this working yet. We do have a start though: if you email fish@pricecod.com with a barcode number in the subject line, the Pricecod fish will (probably) email you back. No promises on the quality of the e-mail; it’s a work in progress. There’s a lot of pieces to tie together for our ideal app to work - we’ve been busy learning about OCR, SMS & SMTP protocol, and APIs for shopping sites like Amazon and Google Products. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate if you want to be one of Pricecod’s first beta testers. Just email fish@pricecod.com (there’s a barcode somewhere near you, I know it. Check the bottom of your kleenex box) and then let me know what you think. Thanks! -Maia Bittner

Source: Maia Bittner

Note: This post is a fortnight ‘cause its author was lazy getting relevant images. This should dispel any myths about an Olin time travel project, as the author promises that had he the means the travel back in time and post it on Halloween, he would have.
This Halloween, I walked through the dining hall en route to a sandwich and couldn’t help smirking at one of the Jack O’Lanterns sitting along the hallway. Being a new arrival and not brainwashed by Olin culture, I immediately stopped and thought to myself “How strange.” and “Why would anyone at Olin be afraid of this?”

Ohh, scary!

I call it the PI-umpkin (after the control system it models) and find it an excellent segue to a common piece of Olin knowledge and non-obvious qualities of the Olin community. Simulink is responsible for the strange shapes carved on the pumpkin, and my fellow first years and I find ourselves spending a lot of quality time with Simulink. Simulink is a math modeling program from The MathWorks. Simulink can model PI control (the pumpkin); Simulink can model the “detumbling” and sun alignment of the Cloud CubeSat (very nifty Olin-Nasa Research Group Project); Simulink could probably model and control the drying of your laundry.Perhaps the coolest thing Simulink can do is allow you to create differential equations just by piecing together several “blocks” (for example, the sideways triangles above, gain blocks) in a way that represents measurable values of the system and the relationship between these values.So what does the PI-umpkin say about Olin? It says that Oliners take a lot of the same classes (and with 300 students, we have to). It says that Oliners blur lines between work and play, between class and social. And perhaps best of all, the PI-umpkin shows that we are proud of Olin and–in the greatest spirit of satire–like to make fun of ourselves.
I mean, really, how many colleges do you know of with students who regularly wear shirts like this:

or this

?

Colin

Source: computercolin

All right, I lied. There are in fact zero references to tambourines in this post. Nevertheless, I had to do something to get your attention so I could introduce myself as the tardiest of the new student bloggers! My name is Chris, and I am the second of the new freshman bloggers, joining our very own Colin. I will not even bother describing my many and varied interests, from computers to catapults to business and puppies (but I seldom exercise all the possible combinations of those).

Thus, I might as well jump right in to the overall point of this post: To tell you about an excursion I had two weekends ago in building trebuchets and launching pumpkins. One fine, breezy, and colorful fall day here in New England, I awoke to the rising sun through my window, and promptly checked my email for the first of many times that day. At the time, it was unbeknownst to me what I would encounter…

I knew I had to do it. How could I possibly turn down the opportunity to throw pumpkins across ridiculous distances using absurdly over engineered devices that would likely deprive me of sleep for the better part of weekend just to build? It was an offer I could not refuse. Within days, a team was assembled, plans were drafted, and devious actions began to get underway. At the very least, we hoped our device would smash the pumpkins (or itself) in a spectacular way. When the fortuitous day finally came upon us, we were ready. We were prepared to offer our blood, toil, tears, and sweat to wage war upon the pumpkins by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength Olin’s power tools could give us.

However, that was only the beginning. We had no idea what to possibly expect. After the challenge formally started, we decided on our final trebuchet design around 3pm (other teams did an air canon and a slingshot), and then waited until 8pm to do a Home Depot run for supplies. Before I discuss the sheer scale of our trebuchet, let me show you the rough CADD sketch I put together:

We did modify our design somewhat from this sketch, which also does not include a sling, trough, or weight container, but that represents a 16′ throwing arm, 12′ long base, and 8′ tall trebuchet. We designed our weight container afterwards to support up to 600 lbs of sand, optimized to a 100:1 ratio for throwing objects. We built through the night, and thanks to daylight savings time, got to bed at 4am with the majority of our parts built, but not constructed. It was quite a unique experience building a trebuchet in the middle of the Olin ‘O’ for several hours straight in the dark, with work-lights rigged on a 2×4. The next morning between 11am and 4pm we brought all of our parts down to some of Olin’s Parcel B, and setup the siege engines in the middle of our autonomous vehicle-testing track. After bending a 1″ steel pipe on our first weighted launch with only 150 lbs of counterweight, we proceeded to optimize our sling design and try to get the trebuchet to launch. It eventually succeeded, probably getting us between 50 and 100 feet, but with a crack developing down the center of the throwing arm once we added more weight, it was time to call it quits.

Overall though, my experience two weeks ago was one of the most unique spans of ~30 hours that I have ever experienced. It brought me back to old memories of Junkyard Wars and classic Mythbusters. It was also an amazing team experience working with four other people to get such a tremendous project done. Moreover, it gave me great ideas for trebuchet mk.ii, expected to make its debut sometime potentially possibly in the vicinity of maybe the Candidate’s Weekends next year.

Sincerely,

Chris

Source: Chris Marra

As a senior, I am (hopefully) almost done with my Olin education.  Perhaps some of our readers will be interested to see what my schedule has looked like over the past few years.

Source: Angela

Last time I blogged, I wrote about how I was entering some work in an art show here. It turns out that four of my five pieces were selected for the show. My resume just got a little more interesting.

The opening itself was pretty successful. Despite the show being in a place I personally wouldn’t have noticed had I been walking by, there was a fairly substantial crowd.

(That’s my roommate, Zoe, in the striped dress. She also had 4 pieces in the show and managed to pick up a few commissions as well. Also, I apologize for the blurriness of some of these. I was trying not to use my camera flash.)

There were enough people to totally demolish the buffet, in fact.

That was one of several tables.

The show itself was an interesting mix of styles. There were pieces that very obviously came from Angel Academy (a classical arts school here in Florence), and there were pieces that were very obviously more about commentary than technique. There were Renaissance-looking pieces and installations utilizing Flash. The more classical pieces won more of the awards, possibly due to the fact that there was only one judge, but all of the pieces seemed to be well-received.

The Best in Show went to a self-portrait bust.

This is a charcoal drawing. I was blown away. It was done by a student at Angel. Apparently these take a good part of a semester, and students have to draw plaster casts for their first two years of study.

These four pieces are a sub-series of a currently uncompleted work. My friend, Shai, painted these on random cloth he found and stretched himself. He ended up selling these the first night.

In this photo, you can see two of Zoe’s pieces and four from another artist who apparently wants you to plant a tree.

I think the most exciting part of the night, though, was my nametag:

Oh. Yes.
Just a few weeks left in Florence now, and only about two months left in Europe. Where did the time go?

-Jessi

Source: Jessi

Reading Books

I usually don’t let my book stack get so high - it’s at 16 books now! I’m currently reading Titan, a biography of Rockefeller and The Prize, a history of the oil industry, for my independent study in business this semester. I’m also reading the Sexual Life of Catherine M., borrowed from Joe (’09) as my keep-me-sane book. Still on the yet-to-read list is The Moral Animal, recommended to me by Jon (’08ish) after I told him how much I liked The Naked Ape, Woman, loaned to me by Angela, Phantoms in the Brain, recommended to me by Bill (’10), The Blank Slate, recommended to me by Colin, and a whole bunch more. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I read almost every book recommended to me. (Most of them come free-ish from BookMooch). Have any favorites you want to send my way?

Getting packages

Admittedly less fun since the mail room switched to email notifications over little paper slips in our mailboxes, but still a pretty exciting event. Most of my packages come from me fulfilling all my materialistic desires using Ducker’s Amazon Prime account (free 2-day shipping!). I thankfully also got a care package last week from my aunt though. The included banana bread supplied nearly all of my calories for the 2 days I was on campus over Thanksgiving break without the Dining Hall.

Writing Letters

I’m obsessed with buying stationary on Etsy and then writing lots of letters. This is my stationary box - it has all my cards and pretty paper and stickers and envelopes and stamps and everything else I need for mailing letters. My newest stationary is in front with that cool picture of a brain on it.

5 days of class left in the semester
Only 5 days of class left… to finish up all my work… from the whole semester. It’s a good thing, right?

Love,
Maia

Source: Maia Bittner

Live from Design Nature Studio 1, AC 204, this is Colin Zwiebel. From the looks of the room, there is some real creativity going on the room is getting messier as we progress further into Monday.

Why are so many first-years working passionately through their sleeping hours? Tomorrow, amid the end of classes and looming finals, a very ruthless bunch of individuals will converge on Olin. That’s right, a class of 4th graders are coming to review swimmers, the final project of Design Nature.

Design Nature, part of what is now dubbed the “Olin Introductory Experience,” is described as a “focus is on the general principles and methods
that shape the practice of engineering design.” Design Nature goes through this process by designing two bio-inspired devices. The first device is the hopper, a self-powered, plastic (Delrin, to be specific) jumping toy that must trigger and jump by itself after being placed on a flat surface. The second device is our beloved swimmer. Swimmers, which have replaced Climbers as the end-of-term Design Nature project, are built in small teams of 3-5 people. They must meet the needs of the stakeholders, which in this case are the parties concerned with children’s toys. (Parents, kids, manufacturers) Teams may bring in outside supplies, up to a limit of $50 value, and this project consumes the last 10 weeks of class time. Along the way we learn project scheduling, budgeting, team dynamics, different design approaches, technical knowledge (depending on your design), and all the juicy gossip on our team members**.

Phelpinators motion proposal diagram, part of the concept review stage of swimmer design.

Where are we in the design process? Project time-lines (this one courtesy of Rock Lobster) are required, though they won’t stop the creative **cough-procrastination-cough** juices from concentrating near the end of the project. Don’t worry Rock Hoppers, I’m not accusing you.

Will it swim? Jacqui and Charlie take their Nautilus for a dip.

We haven’t made it to demo day yet. We are at about t minus 8 hours. Things are getting pretty crazy. I’ve heard more references to internet memes than is healthy. Some teams are getting into the spirit of their projects, like the hippo team which is kindly serenading us with I want a hippopotamus for Christmas on infinite loop. Others seem to being doing pre-tests of their swimmers by reducing the effective age though chair surfing and other raucous horseplay. The Wellesley Domino’s delivery dude is probably glad we passed their closing hour. I have seen many, sporadic orders of Alex Davis Specials come through. I am confident, however, that we will make it though the night, have (mostly) swimming toys, final SolidWorks models, and maybe even some PR propaganda.

Swimmers are… to be continued.

Colin

*Less on the fabrication side, unless you consider first-years to be the manufacturer.

**That last one might not be a learning goal.

Source: computercolin

As the semester comes to a close and everyone is busy finishing up their projects, I had a thought.

Working in groups at Olin is hard.

My Software Design team works on building Pricecod

And, well, this is why Olin stresses team-based projects in many, if not most of its classes. The idea is that by learning (suffering?) now, students will develop the teamwork and communication skills that industry tells us they so sorely lack. There is a huge discrepancy between the engineers in corporate environments who mostly work in teams, and undergraduate engineering students who traditionally focus on individual work and projects. Olin is specifically trying to resolve this discrepancy by reforming undergraduate education to incorporate the “increased emphasis on business, teamwork, interdisciplinary design and communications skills” urged by leaders in the engineering industry.

I think it’s a great idea. I’m worried that Olin’s approach of having mainly team-based classes is too broadly applied though. The experience I had this semester made me feel that the structure of Olin’s groups in content-based classes is fundamentally different than anything we’ll see in our future jobs, and that this approach is neither helping us learn now, nor preparing us well for our post-graduation lives.

When working in San Francisco (never as an engineer), group responsibilities were always very well defined. In some situations, I would be working with the Designer and VP of Engineering to flesh out the product roadmap. In these meetings, we’d all bring our ideas and research to the table, and hammer out a plan. The designer would then go make the necessary graphical resources, I would write up a functional requirements document, and the VP Engineering would work out the database design and technical implementation. Later, I would be working with engineers to get the new feature built. They would ask me questions on the design, interaction, and prioritization of various aspects of the feature, which I would either know, decide, or go find out.

In my software design project, my three person team was at a bit of a loss trying to figure out how to divide up our tasks. We were all learning Python for the first time, we all wanted to learn how to design software well, we had different strengths in different areas, and we wanted the workload to be approximately equal. But where to go from there? The main source of difficulty was from not having a clear goal in mind - were we trying to learn the most about something new? Learn the most from each other? Become experts in one area of software design? Complete our project in the least amount of time as possible? All of these goals have very different work structures. I don’t think this situation arises much in industry, and I doubt the usefulness of having us struggle through it.

So the question is, do teams have a place in subject-oriented classes? How much do they contribute or detract from learning? I don’t know this from personal experience as I’m just now finishing up my 3rd semester, but I suspect (hope?) that Olin’s pretty good at combining its interdisciplinary focus and its focus on teamwork in classes like PoE, Systems, SCOPE, PDD, and Rapid Prototyping. I’m excited to take these classes because I’d love to work with a team in a project/deliverable oriented class, where students from different majors (and with responsibilities corresponding to their majors) are intentionally brought together. I think these projects both increase the depth of a student’s specific knowledge within their field of study, and increase their general communication and teamwork skills. It’s when everyone in a class is trying to learn about the same subject that I have doubts about the value of working in groups. If there’s a set amount of skills or knowledge students should have at the end of class, and completing a project encompasses all this learning, it seems all too easy for some things to slip through the cracks for some or all team members. Might it be better for them to do individual work rather than work in a group where knowledge and learning is necessarily fragmented?

Just some of my thoughts - let me know yours,
Maia

Source: Maia Bittner