Course Introduction The Nature of Engineering

so the engineering of birds is a course uh that's something we call a freshman uh Service Learning freshman seminar and so there there's really two things going on here freshman seminars are set up so that they're a small learning group um in the core MIT freshman year the students mostly are in much larger lecture courses with say 200 students in a lecture and the seminars are set up to be in a smaller group there's at most eight students and typically I have half a dozen students in the seminar I've done it for a few years now um so one one goal is to have a smaller group of students and for them to get to know a faculty member bit more personal level uh the other thing we do is we try to do do some community service project so we've done uh several of these freshman seminars they they've been on different topics each year but uh what we do is is we do a service project for the Boston Nature Center which is run by the Massachusetts Autobon society and me personally I love Natural History I love trees and plants and birds and all this stuff so every year when I choose a topic I I just pick something that I'm interested in and I know a little bit about from an engineering point of view and we we develop educational displays and give them to the Nature Center um at the end of the year so that that's kind of the um the overview of what we're trying to do uh in particular the the one we did this last fall on the engineering of birds we developed a number of PowerPoint presentations so one was on bird nests and one was on how birds fly and one was on bird migration uh so they were on different topics that had some kind of engineering content to them the idea is that the students learn some engineering principles while they're putting together some community service project so what we do in the course is the first time we meet we meet here at MIT and I just describe what the topic is that we're going to be discussing so this past year it was Birds um and then the second week we we meet once a week um and the second week uh we went out to the Nature Center and we met with the people there we talk to them about what they would like us to do and what the sorts of things that we were thinking of doing so we had a a meeting with the people there we looked around the Nature Center uh we've done this the last couple of years and we looked at the projects from the previous years so the students this year could kind of see what we've done in the past so we usually have some of these field trips and you know depending on what the project is we we do different field trips um and then we come back to MIT and we have you know the next week we usually discuss what the projects are going to be and I assign the students into groups so typically they do it in pairs so we might have three pairs of students do three projects and then I try to give them some material some background material and information and then they they put together some sort of a poster or this year it was a PowerPoint presentation and they have a couple of weeks to work on it and then they bring it back and we have a session where we we kind everybody kind of critiques the what people have got so far and then they go away and they work on it on it again and then by the end of the term they've got something pretty much put together and I I sort of help them edit it at the end of the term so so it's a combination of um getting to go out and do some field trips and then putting together some educational displays and I try and explain engineering principles that they need to to make their displays uh put their displays together so the way this course fits into the curriculum is that it's really set up for freshman and it's part of the freshman year uh so it it it's sort of a uh sort of complements the more hardcore you know physics and chemistry and math that the students are taking but in in in another sense it's a way of of sort of showing freshman students something about the materials department and so it's a way to introduce students to this department and I find almost every year I do it at least one or two of the students ends up majoring in Material Science and Engineering I mean one of the things I find is that when freshmen come to MIT you know they're all excited it's MIT it's engineering science this is great um but they don't really have a good idea about what the different types of engineering do so during their freshman year they all take a common core and then towards the end of the spring term they have to choose a major and a lot of them don't really know what material science in engineering is or what chemical engineering is or what mechanical engineering is and this gives them kind of a taste of what material scientist do and I think they find that that quite useful so so this course is taught in such a way that every year we we do a different topic and we produce different displays for the Nature Center and for the Science Museum and the way it really started was I got an email from somebody in the public service center saying would I like to teach a service learning freshman seminar and I had done freshman seminars before but more in a just a seminar format um and I hadn't really done the service learning component and so I had to kind of think about well what would that actually mean I mean I my my background is in mechanics which is kind of Hardcore equations and you know doing experiments it wasn't obvious to me at first how I was going to make a service learning piece of this but as I said I I do love nature stuff I go bird watching and you know like to go walking in the woods that kind of stuff um and so I knew that the mass audabon was opening a new Nature Center and in fact it's just down the street from where I live it's it's very close to where I live and I had sort of gone to talk to the people there just to kind of find out about what they were doing and and uh I talked to my partner and we were you know we were thinking about what I could do she's actually involved with Service Learning at the Harvard Medical School and uh and she suggested you know you could you could do some educational things on this nature stuff that you do your research on so the idea behind Service Learning is to teach students some academic subject but to incorporate a community service aspect into it and there's various ways that people do this and what we've been doing is developing these educational projects for the Nature Center and for the science museum but one of the nice features that I found about it is it's a way of engaging the students it's a way of sort of giving them a project and it's not just a madeup project of something that I said you know go away and do this it's something that they feel somebody's actually going to make use of it actually makes a difference to somebody and one of the things I find is is by the end of the term uh it's sort of a win-win win situation you know I I get a big kick out of it just because I like doing these things but the students feel they've actually made something they've actually created something and they've given it to the Nature Center the Science Museum and and they're going to make use of it and then the Nature Center and the science museum feel like you know just out of the blue we've dropped in and and done something for them that they can use with school groups or with you know groups that come through their facilities so it's a really nice um a nice combination of of sort of giving the students sort of motivating the students and giving them a a concrete thing to work on that somebody else is going to use and then trying to benefit some group in the Community as well so i' I've enjoyed doing it uh for that reason