Innovation is serious business, but sometimes it’s good to have a little fun. And it’s nice to win a prize, too.
The George R. Brown School of Engineering’s Innovate Weekly Challenges are an “Iron Chef” for engineers (or wannabes) who gather at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen classroom on Fridays at noon for a test of their creativity and the chance to win prizes.
Sign-up begins at 11:50 a.m. undefined there is no advance registration undefined and up to 45 participants are placed in teams of three. At the appointed hour, a staff member reveals the week’s challenge with a flourish and the teams race to assemble the provided components into a finished product. In the final minutes of the hourlong event, the teams are judged and the winners split $300 in gift cards.
For the semester’s sixth challenge Feb. 15, teams used four copies of the Rice Thresher, a yard of masking tape and a piece of cardboard to build a scaffold strong enough to hold as many reams of paper and full bottles of water as possible. Engineering students Stephen Yan, James Lockard and Robert Patterson were the champions; see their feat of strength in the video above by Rice producer Brandon Martin.
In previous challenges, participants built tops, assembled puzzles from memory, designed icons, brainstormed uses for common items like paperclips and potatoes and built houses of cards with one arm immobilized.
There will be no challenge during spring break, but the program resumes March 8. An invitation-only All-Star Challenge will wrap the program April 19. The competition is open to all Rice students, faculty and staff. For information, visit http://oedk.rice.edu/innovate.
NBC News’ chief science and health correspondent Robert Bazell (left) stopped by Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen last week, where he sat in on a student workshop about presenting technology to the public. Several students gave presentations about design or research ideas, and Bazell offered suggestions about how they could tweak their pitches to be as effective as possible. Bazell also spoke at the Rice Science Café sponsored by the Wiess School of Natural Sciences. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow)
When you hear a college student say “You have to take this class,” the teacher must be doing something right. One of Ann Saterbak’s goals as a professor in the practice of bioengineering at Rice is to make engineering fun while still challenging. All you have to do is spend a few minutes in her freshman ENG 120 class at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen at Rice University and you will notice she has done that and more. The class takes students from all walks of engineering, then blends them together and creates an environment of team building, deadlines and results.
The following article appeared in The Rice Thresher
By Dixita Viswanath
Published: Thursday, January 17, 2013
Updated: Thursday, January 17, 2013 22:01
The Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen is presenting an opportunity for students, faculty and staff aimed at testing creativity and skill at various challenges, OEDK Director Maria Oden said.
According to Oden, every Friday of this semester, except for during spring break and midterm recess, an OEDKInnovate event will be held from 12-1 p.m. for up to 45 participants. Each week will feature a unique task targeted at different aspects of the creative design process, Oden said.
According to Oden, the purpose of this event is to work in teams to stretch the powers of observation to form remarkable solutions to everyday problems. Participants are not expected to have any prior knowledge to complete the challenge.
Oden said she recognizes students may have other commitments at 1 p.m.
“Participants will be able to register on-site beginning at 11:50 a.m. in the OEDK computer lab,” Oden said. “The program will begin at 12:05 p.m. sharp and will end by 12:55 p.m.”
Upon registration, participants will be divided randomly into teams of three people, Oden said. Participants may neither choose their own teams nor work with the same members more than once.
Participants will be given the appropriate materials to work with and specific instructions at the start of every challenge.Oden said most of the challenges must be completed within a time limit and will be assessed on-site. The winning team will split a $300 prize among the three participants.
Oden said she got the idea for the program after attending a meeting this summer called “Frontiers of Engineering Education” and talking to a professor from St. Louis University about a similar program at his university.
“[At SLU,] the challenge became a kind of a weekly institution,” Oden said. “They had to move it into the student center because so many people came to participate and watch the event. I want Rice’s OEDK’s Innovate program to eventually be that full.”
This program is being funded through money given directly to the OEDK in support of its activities, Oden said. In the future, Oden hopes to encourage sponsors for this program.
This past Friday, roughly 55 participants showed up to the first OEDK Innovate challenge. The first 45 participants were given entrance. For the first challenge, participants were given three jigsaw puzzles and were instructed to finish each one within the time limit. Oden said the first puzzle consisted of 100 pieces. The second puzzle was a bit trickier; participants were allowed to look at the picture for one minute. The third puzzle was a 3-D model of a cat.
Brown College junior Melody Tan, one of the three first-place winners of the competition, said that without coordination within the group, success would have not have been possible.
“We definitely had to work together to solve the puzzles,” Tan said. “For example, for the second puzzle, each of us memorized one section of the puzzle and proceeded to build that section in particular.”
Jones College freshman Madeleine Crouch, another winner of the first OEDK Innovate challenge, arrived without any expectations for the hour.
“I wanted to attend the challenge because I wanted to meet other students interested in solving puzzles and thinking outside the box,” Crouch said. “I also wanted to challenge myself by attempting to solve some difficult problems that fell outside the scope of normal classwork.”
According to OEDK Administrative Coordinator Marilee Dizon, the registration computers crashed prior to the event. The problem was solved almost immediately, leaving a smooth run for the first OEDK Innovate challenge.
“If, in the future, our biggest problem is a malfunction with our computers, I’ll consider every week a success,” Dizon said.
Oden said each week’s winning team would be featured on the OEDK website at oedk.rice.edu.
If you stopped by the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen classroom on Friday, odds were you saw a flurry of activity, as students, faculty and staff bent their heads over the room’s tables, talking and working to put together a series of puzzles.
It was the kickoff of OEDK INNOVATE, a new program designed to foster communication and problem solving skills in a fun environment. Each week, a new challenge will be unveiled and 15 teams of three will have about 45-minutes to complete it. The winning team receives $300.
“This is a challenge for you to spread your creativity and design skills,” said Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. She said the concept for the weekly challenges began after she attended National Academies of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering Education conference, where she met a professor from St. Louis University who was hosting similar weekly events for the school’s students.
“We’ve taken this in our own direction,” she said. “And we’ve been working on it since last fall, and the team at the OEDK has really embraced it.”
Each of the upcoming challenges will be different, but the idea behind them is the same: put faculty, staff and students in teams to solve problems and help them improve their communication and collaborative abilities.
The first challenge involved putting together three different puzzles in a specific amount of time. For the first puzzle, teams were allowed to refer to the puzzle box for reference. On the second puzzle, they only had a minute to look at the picture and had to put it together from memory. The third puzzle was a 3-D cat. Team #15, with engineering students Melody Tan, Madeleine Crouch and Benhang Shi, won the $300 prize, completing all three puzzles in a combined time of 30 minutes and one second.
“This isn’t what I expected when I signed up to take part,” said Shi. “I was thinking it would be more like other engineering design challenges.”
“We developed a different strategy for each puzzle,” said Crouch. “With the second one, we each memorized a quadrant of the puzzle before we had to put the picture away and then we worked on that individually before putting the whole thing together.”
“There was lots of great energy in the room,” said Oden. “That’s very gratifying to me. And I’m hoping a lot from this group come back for future challenges.”
Sentiment from several people in the classroom is that they will.
Registration for OEDK INNOVATE challenges takes place every Friday at 11:50 a.m., with challenges starting promptly at noon. Registration is limited to the first 45 people to sign up. All Rice students, staff and faculty are invited to participate.
Students present at the World Usability Day forum in Fondren Library's Kyle Morrow Room.
World Usability Day at Rice University Thursday afternoon provided an opportunity to highlight Rice undergraduates’ remarkable design ingenuity and resourcefulness as they learn to create equipment and devices that serve important functions and audiences around the world.
Usually the second Thursday in November, World Usability Day promotes the values of usability, usability engineering and user-centered design.
Vice Provost and University Librarian Sara Lowman welcomed attendees to the forum, “Designing Technology Around the World,” in Fondren Library’s Kyle Morrow Room.
Emcee and Vice President for Administration Kevin Kirby recounted his firsthand experience with the importance of usability. He served in the U.S. Army research laboratory earlier in his career. “Usability for the Army is a matter of life and death; it’s not a matter of convenience,” he said. For Kirby, this included an experience testing equipment at the Army’s Cold Regions Test Center in Bolio Lake, Alaska, in temperatures below 60 degrees and realizing the clothing being worn by soldiers was too bulky to use the equipment.
Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, said engineering students at Rice are learning the importance of designing toward usability from the get-go in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. The OEDK is a unique engineering design facility for undergraduates. “We really liked the concept of a kitchen where you put together disparate things in a recipe and you create something that’s even better than the parts,” Oden said. “I see that happening at the kitchen all the time. It’s not just about the parts. It’s not about the equipment. It’s about the learning that students do. It’s about the teamwork that they do and working with real clients that have real needs, and our students are needing to learn and understand what those needs are.”
Oden cited the example of a low-cost, Rice student-designed device that helps newborns in respiratory distress in Malawi in southern Africa. Bubble continuous positive airway pressure (bCPAP) undefined devices are commonly used in the developed world to treat infants whose respiratory systems are underdeveloped or compromised by infection. However, at $6,000 each, the devices are often too expensive for hospitals in the developing world. The bCPAP device was developed in the design kitchen by seniors as their engineering design capstone project in 2010. Working in collaboration with the Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, Rice’s bCPAP can be built for $160 and delivers the same therapeutic pressure as devices in hospitals in the developed world.
Students in Ann Saterbak’s Engineering 120 class are showing similar ingenuity. Saterbak is a professor in the practice of bioengineering education and the Department of Bioengineering’s associate chair for undergraduate affairs. Her Engineering 120 course requires first-year students to use the engineering design process to solve real community and global problems. Students are divided into teams that evaluate design requirements and create solutions in the design kitchen, and more senior students mentor students in design, leadership and communication.
Engineering 120 student projects showcased at the forum included a special robotic arm aid for reaching. The Robotic Assisted Reaching Mechanism (R-Arm) is helping a young patient at Shriners Hospital for Children who is suffering brittle bone disease, a genetic disease that prevents the proper formation of bones and causes them to be weak and break and that also limits growth. The R-ARM helps the patient conduct the simplest daily tasks. Another Engineering 120 project is helping a Shriners Hospital patient suffering from arthrogryposis, a condition causing underdeveloped muscles and stiff joints. Called the Shirtmate, the low-cost contraption allows a moderately able patient to put on a T-shirt without much movement and exertion.
Austin Govella, a design manager with business technology services company Avanade, also spoke at the event, which was sponsored by the Fondren Library Accessibility Committee and Rice University Disability Support Services. For more information about World Usability Day, visit www.worldusabilityday.org.
Rice University will mark World Usability Day Nov. 15 with a forum featuring a range of Rice experts discussing “Designing Technology Around the World.”
World Usability Day promotes the values of usability, usability engineering and user-centered design.
The event, which promotes the values of usability, usability engineering and user-centered design, will be from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in Fondren Library’s Kyle Morrow Room. Speakers are Kevin Kirby, vice president for administration; Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen; Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of bioengineering education and the Department of Bioengineering’s associate chair for undergraduate affairs; and Austin Govella, a design manager with business technology services company Avanade. Several Rice student projects will be highlighted.
This event is sponsored by the Fondren Library Accessibility Committee and Rice University Disability Support Services. For more information about World Usability Day, visit www.worldusabilityday.org.
Academy report is twice as nice for Rice engineering
National Academy of Engineering highlights Beyond Traditional Borders, NanoJapan in report on exemplary programs
HOUSTON – (Nov. 15, 2012) – Rice University engineering initiatives are prominently featured in a report issued this week by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
The publication, "Infusing Real World Experiences into Engineering Education," features case studies on Rice's Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) program and the NanoJapan: International Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Among the 28 colleges and universities in the report, only Rice is featured twice.
"The inclusion of two Rice programs, BTB and NanoJapan, in this important NAE report is no surprise, given that Rice engineering is all about exposing our students to experiences that push them well beyond their comfort zones and urge them to journey into places far from Houston, leading to great professional development and maturity across a variety of engineering disciplines," said Ned Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering.
The report (available as a free download here) spotlights schools that incorporate real-world experiences into their curricula and highlights best practices for institutions seeking to create new programs, according to the NAE.
Each case study compares anticipated versus actual program outcomes to demonstrate how well the programs prepare their engineering students.
Beyond Traditional Borders, part of the Rice 360˚: Institute for Global Health Technologies, trains students to use the engineering design process to develop solutions to global health challenges provided by physicians in the developing world. Students work on their inventions at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and often develop them further using feedback they gather from physicians during internships in developing nations.
NanoJapan is a 12-week international research experience that prepares undergraduate students to work in cross-cultural settings in Japan. The program seeks to cultivate an interest in nanotechnology among first- and second-year students while adding to their research skill sets and simultaneously educating them in culture, language and nanoscale science. The program was founded in 2006; since then, more than 106 American students from 37 institutions, including three community colleges, have participated. While the program traditionally takes place in Japan, in the wake of 2011's devastating earthquake, 25 Japanese students from partner labs in Japan came to Rice for three months of study.
"The report amply demonstrates Rice leadership in translating fundamental science and engineering into high-impact practice," Rice Provost George McLendon said. "We are extraordinarily proud of the many ways in which Rice engineers make the world better."
"This nation’s prosperity, security and quality of life are direct results of leadership in the engineering achievements that drive society forward," said NAE President Charles Vest. "These programs are strategically preparing students to become the engineers who will tackle the technical and social complexities that lie ahead in the 21st century."
The NAE is one of four organizations that make up the National Academies, along with the National Academy of Sciences (created by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863), the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology and health policy advice under a congressional charter.
For starters, here are three things you probably don’t know about the latest Mars rover, the car-sized rover that landed on the red planet in August:
One person’s signature flew with Curiosity: that of the schoolgirl who named it, Clara Ma.
For all its advanced science, the rover has less computer power than a typical smartphone.
The patterns on its wheels spell out “JPL” (for Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Morse code.
If you were at the talk by two members of the rover team at Rice University’s Duncan Hall Nov. 1, you’d already know all that. Ravi Prakash, descent and landing engineer at NASA’s JPL in Pasadena, Calif., and Bobak Ferdowsi, the mission’s activity lead and flight director, were the final speakers this semester in the Space Frontiers Lecture Series sponsored by the Rice Space Institute (RSI) and the Wiess School of Natural Sciences.
The talk capped a full day at Rice that saw them participate in a lunchtime panel hosted by RSI executive director and astronaut Mike Massimino, taking in a robotics competition at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen with robotics scientist James McLurkin and meeting with engineering leadership students.
The speakers relived the rover’s thrilling descent over what NASA billed as “Seven Minutes of Terror,” a reference to the complex landing that allowed the vehicle to touch down gently on its wheels. Their opening video montage mixed animation, actual footage of the landing and the cheers of crowds at JPL mission control and at NASA sites all over the country, which stayed open until the wee hours for the touchdown.
After that, it was down to details as they talked through the process of dropping a ton of technology onto another planet, and what they hope to achieve. “Every single part has a story,” Prakash said.
Other things those in the packed McMurtry Auditorium learned:
The capsule that brought Curiosity to Mars was bigger than an Apollo capsule that carried three astronauts to the moon.
Bobak Ferdowsi, left, and Ravi Prakash of the Mars lander team talk with students at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen on Nov. 1. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
There are six miles of cable inside the rover. The plastic coating on the cable – in fact, anything plastic on Curiosity – had to be baked in a vacuum to eliminate outgassing elements that could have smeared the optics. “When you smell that new-car smell, that’s actually outgassing. That’s the vinyl and leather and everything that has a small amount of material wafting away,” Ferdowsi said.
When Ferdowsi joined the Curiosity team, it had around 30 members. At the project’s peak, he said, about 7,000 were involved in every aspect of the mission. “It took 5,000 man years to get this done. That puts it in perspective,” he said.
Curiosity entered Mars’ atmosphere going 13,500 miles per hour. On the surface, the rover travels at the breakneck speed of 1.7 inches per second. “Why do we go that slow? Because it’s so far away,” Prakish said. “We can’t send triple-A to get a tow.”
Rocks that were kicked up onto the rover’s top deck surprised everyone on the team – almost. Engineers were wise enough to put dust covers over most of the sensitive equipment, which limited damage from landing to one of two weather instruments (and minor at that).
The filmmakers who created the film “Wall-E” visited the team to learn how rovers move.
A Lincoln penny rode with Curiosity as a tribute to the field geologists who would be getting so much data back. “Geologists often carry a unit of currency with them so they can take images and have a reference,” Ferdowsi said.
The rover’s plutonium power plant puts out about 120 watts of electricity a day, about enough to run a couple of light bulbs. The mission is scheduled for two years, but both scientists suspect Curiosity will still be on the job a decade from now.
Curiosity will never rust, as there are only trace amounts of oxygen on Mars.
Prakish helped engineer the risky landing that saw Curiosity first slowed by a parachute to 1,000 miles per hour and then brought to the surface by a rocket-powered module that gently lowered the rover on tethers before flying away to crash.
Ferdowsi, still sporting the trademark Mohawk that made him an instant Internet meme on the night of the landing, went from work on the transit team during the journey to Mars to his current duties as part of the roving team, which puts Curiosity through its day-to-day paces.
Both look forward to the day when humans are sent to Mars. “One of the things to consider in manned versus robotics: We’ve spent all of three months on Mars and accomplished, basically, what a geologist could accomplish before lunchtime,” Ferdowsi said.
Learn much more about Curiosity by watching the Rice lecture via the webcast to be posted soon by RSI.
It was like “Thunder Mountain times 1,000.” That was Ned Thomas’s description of flying with a member of the Blue Angels this week at Houston’s Ellington Field, where the Navy flight demonstration team is preparing for this weekend’s annual Wings Over Houston Air Show. Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering,was one of a select few invited to ride a Boeing F/A-18 Hornet Oct. 24 in the run-up to this week’s performances.
Thomas boasted of experiencing 6.8 times the force of gravity “and didn’t black out,” he said. The flight was “fast undefined really, really fast.”
Thomas in pre-flight mode before this week's demonstration flight on one of the Blue Angels' F/A-18 Hornets.
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