Mountains over a serene alpine lake
« All Posts by this Blogger
a picture of martin and his engineering team with an advanced trash can between them, their engineering project!

This term, I've been taking ENGS 21, Introduction to Engineering. At Dartmouth, engineering takes a project-oriented learning approach, and so for this "intro" course we've basically been designing and building a project of our own interest for the whole term, learning the engineering process along the way and helping solve the problem that we've identified.

Each week in ENGS 21, we learn new engineering "skills" or techniques that help with our project. Each group is assigned a helpful teaching assistant (a student who has taken the course before) and an instructor at the Dartmouth machine shop—the specialized engineering tools and machines area. 

As far as identifying a problem to solve, we were given the freedom to choose any problem we liked as long as there was a clear goal. We decided we wanted to improve recycling—specifically, the recycling of aluminum cans. My group has been designing and building a "smart can recycling" machine in order to prevent recycling waste—specifically, cans—from getting contaminated with other items or substances by sorting pure cans from any other objects.

a cylindrical hole with an arduino attached, on top of pvc pipes and a wooden platform, martin's first prototype!
Our first working prototype of our machine... made of PVC pipe and some circuitry!

We've been testing, designing prototypes, collecting feedback, redesigning prototypes, and—as of just recently—producing our final product, which we call "Smart Sort." In ENGS 21, a significant part of your class is also presenting your work to judges, collecting feedback from them on the engineering process, and integrating their suggestions. It's a great introduction to the engineering process, as professors and faculty guide you through whatever project you choose! I've provided some photos of our project below:

a plastic pad attached to a small servo motor, held in martin's hand
These are some components I 3D-modeled and printed for our sorting mechanism, a skill you'll learn in ENGS 21!

a tall trash can wrapped in LEDs with a sign on top, saying "place cans here!"
Our final working prototype and product... Smart Sort!

If ENGS 21: Intro to Engineering sounds interesting to you, you should consider taking it… who knows, maybe you'll decide to study engineering at Dartmouth!

Martin

Posts You Might Like