Real-World Engineering
2.009 exposes students to the rewards of product development
By Katharine Dunn

Last fall, mechanical-engineering seniors enrolled in 2.009, Product Engineering Processes, were asked to rank their career goals in a preclass survey. The results were perhaps characteristic of financially strapped students: more than half put management consulting at the top of their lists. Near the bottom for most was product development. "We were very profit minded," says Christina Bonebreak '05.

But in a survey conducted at the end of the semester, Associate Professor David Wallace, SM '91, PhD '95, found that their goals had flipped: product development was at the top, management consulting at the bottom. One possible explanation is that the one-semester course offers students deadline-driven, real-world experiences that demonstrate to many of them, perhaps for the first time, how work they do can help people.

At the beginning of the semester, the 100 students in the class are randomly divided into six groups of 15 to 18 each. Their task is to devise a product around a theme, which last year was alternative energy, energy conservation, and cleaner energy. Each team spends the first two months of the class simply settling on a project. First, the teammates do market research and come up with about 100 product ideas. Then they attend a fair where researchers and nonprofits present problems they may choose to try to solve. Wallace, who has run the course since 1996, added the idea fair to the curriculum in 2002 as a way to introduce students to more service-related products.

Most of the teams developed products suggested at the 2004 fair. Kinkajuice, a human-powered battery charger that works like a rowing machine, solved a problem posed by the Cambridge, MA-based nonprofit Design That Matters. Another team built a charcoal extruder that creates charcoal briquettes from empty sugar cane stalks. The problem, posed by Amy Smith '84, Eng '95, SM '95, of the Edgerton Center, was to provide an alternative fuel that could be used in Haiti, whose main source of fuel has been depleted by deforestation. The fair also inspired students to create the Vacpac, a backpack refrigerator for carrying vaccines to remote villages in developing countries, and Sol-Pump, a water pump that runs off thermal energy collected in a solar trough. The idea for the Sol-Pump came from an engineering educational center in Lesotho, Africa, that develops alternative power sources. There were a couple consumer products, however. Students developed MP4ever, an MP3 player that uses a runner's motion to charge itself, and Sonic Seesaw, a see-saw that powers a pipe organ as children rock up and down on it.

The teams are given lab space in which to build their products, a shed of tools, and $6,500 for supplies--a sum underwritten by corporate sponsors including Ford, General Motors, and United Technologies. Throughout the term, they're graded and ranked against each other on sketch models, mock-ups, and final presentations, where they present their preliminary business plans and demonstrate prototypes.

But for many students, the class's greatest reward has nothing to do with grades. Says Dexter Ang '05, who is fabricating a second-generation charcoal extruder for his undergraduate thesis, "It was what was missing from my MIT experience: using my mind to help people." Some of the 2.009 products may do just that. The Sol-Pump has already been tested in Africa and the charcoal produced by the extruder in Haiti, and so far the responses to both devices have been encouraging.