Principal Investigator
Prof. Daniel Frey, Mechanical Engineering
Fund:
d'Arbeloff Fund
Funding Period:
AY2014
Department/Lab/Center:
Mechanical Engineering
The MIT course 2.007 “Design and Manufacturing” has a long history of teaching MIT students core engineering skills in a context wherein they can express their creativity. This project is an initial step in exploring the connection of 2.007 and MITx. Most existing MIT subjects can be transitioned to Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) formats at roughly the effort of developing a new course. 2.007 “Design and Manufacturing” is a more difficult entity to scale on the internet, but that it is possible to do and worth the extra effort. It will create a distinction and competitive advantage for MIT in this space. This project wants to hold firm to the principle that every student getting the “2.007 experience” should design and build a robot. This is done via a residential experience with a well-equipped lab and supervision of skilled lab technicians, but this project's hypothesis is that it can be done in a very different way connecting CAD, “art to part” means of production, and a web of design advising. This project is intended to develop, over the next two years, some key ingredients that will improve the residential experience and will setup an expansion through MITx in a year or two.