Interphase Presentations August 5th

Selected comments and reflections:

Ed Moriarty: "...The main thing we were trying to do here is give you an opportunity to use your imagination and creativity and do something with it. That was pretty much it. You have enough help with study habits, taking tests, and stuff like that, but where do you have that creative expression? Where do you have that opportunity to do something? That's what this program is about. Really, the judge of how you do is you. It's not really us; we just try to set the stage for you to come up with an idea and then go for it. You get out of this kind of program what you put into it, and some of you have put some pretty cool stuff into this. This is an opportunity to show it.

... I know it's going to be dramatic, but talk about not just your project but the things you gained from it—not just the technical stuff...."

"...I know there are a lot of people who come into MIT with robotics experience, but personally, before this project, I had never built anything in my life. It was really nice to learn some concepts that I knew in theory, especially related to coding or electronics, but that I had never actually put into practice. I think this is a great way to learn a different aspect of it that you wouldn't usually see in a classroom. In high school, I did a lot of robotics, and I think this just made me more excited about what I'm going to be doing here at MIT. It's really fun to see that I'm going to be working on projects like this in the next four years. I'm very excited. I don't know how to play bass; none of us do. We intend on learning, though...."

"...I'm actually kind of curious about that last comment. Why does putting something copper on there interfere with the sound? Pickups work on electromagnets, and it dampens the signal...."

On the feeling of this project, I'll go first. First of all, there was less stress. Teams are usually more stressful, but this turned out to be more fun than anything. Curiosity guided our learning. We got to choose what we worked on, and we chose the final product instead of the competition choosing for us. That made it more motivational. Many teams are motivated only by winning, so you just get split apart into sections, and you have to work in that section. Here, we had the liberty to work on whatever we wanted.

"...I would add that, in a competition team, in my experience, there's always a leader—someone who has past experience in a competition. Here, we all had some experience before, but not on personal projects. I felt the workload was split very evenly among us. It was nice to know that you were contributing just as much as everybody else. It was definitely a lot less stressful. I liked using Onshape because I had so much wiggle room for what I could do. My robot team used Creo Parametric, and if you've talked to me about CAD software, you know I hate Creo. It's by the same company as Onshape, but it's the worst. Forget I even mentioned it; it's the thing of nightmares...."

"..I really liked being able to do hands-on stuff...."

"...I did robotics for two years, and I never set foot in the mechanical sub-team other than to get measurements for the CAD. They would then say, "Oh, we changed everything." Being able to see the products get built at the same time and have a lot more communication was great. They needed my measurements to build, and it wasn't like, "Oh, we changed the parts 15 weeks ago; can you catch up and make the new CAD stuff?" I wouldn't say it was low stress because we did lose track of time, and right at the end, we only had half of a wing functioning. But it was a lot more fun than I think the robotics team would have been in the same amount of time...."