Archive for August, 2008

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built

Posted by Sheri on August 28th, 2008 | No Comments »

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built is a three hour television series which originally aired on the BBC in 1997. It is based on the book of the same name by Stewart Brand, a scientist, artist and veteran of the environmental movement. Brand is also the creator of the well known The Whole Earth Catalog and the Long Now Foundation.

The television series features Brand explaining how different buildings were or were not built to withstand time and change. He looks at how buildings adjust to having new residents with new needs for the space. Buildings that provide people unique spaces that can be individualized and adapted to fit a varity of specific needs, demonstrate how buildings learn.

Filed under Society


NSF Funds the first global engineering classroom

Posted by Sheri on August 27th, 2008 | No Comments »

Engineering Students from the U.S. had a chance to work with other engineering students from Japan in a cross-cultural classroom setting. The students meet to learn about innovation in the field of glass science. The International Materials Institute (IMI) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored the pioneering program. Experts in the field from the U.S., Japan, Brazil and France taught the classes U.S. and Japanese students participated in. The students meet for two weeks in Kyoto, Japan.

Students looking to go abroad to do research in Asian countries also have the opportunity participate in another the NSF funded program. The East Asian and Pacific Summer Institute (EAPSI) program, funds students to do research in Asian and Pacific countries abroad. Although students don’t work in such a global classroom setting, they do stay with host families and have an opportunity to learn about another culture and gain access to the different resources and perspectives on their research project that the global environment provides.

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UT-Austin Students Collaborate With Indian Counterparts on Third World E-learning

Posted by Dylan on August 25th, 2008 | No Comments »

Engineering Students at the University of Texas at Austin recently worked with students at a university in southwest India on the already well known One Laptop per Child program. Five Seniors in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) at UT-Austin collaborated together in two teams with five students at Amrita University in developing a prototypical solar charger for the computer, along with power management software, and in developing a low bandwidth e-learning system for delivering lectures to students in remote areas. The e-learning system will continue to be worked on in the coming year by a new team, while students who participated in the program last year credit it with helping improve communication and teamwork skills.

The senior design sequence is designed to help ensure that students graduating with an ECE degree are adequately prepared to enter an international workforce and become part of teams working on complex projects. This two-semester sequence teaches students skills such as risk and project management and allows them to explore professional-grade tools for capturing their designs and supporting the collaboration. In addition to the multi-institutional option, senior design projects can also be multi-disciplinary, leading, for example, to teams that blend EE and mechanical engineering students.

During the pilot offering of the multi-institutional senior design option, five students at UT and five students at Amrita University in southwest India divided into two cross-institutional teams. Both teams targeted the One Laptop Per Child platform. One team developed the prototype for a solar charger with power management software. The other team developed the prototype of a low-bandwidth e-learning system designed to deliver lectures to remote locations in third-world countries. A new multi-institutional team will continue work on the e-learning system during the 2008-2009 academic year. A participant in the pilot offering reports, “This project taught me how to deal with an international team. Dealing with the cultural, lingual, and time differences made me more confident and improved my communication skills. We got to know the people in India and became a wonderful team with great spirit and enthusiasm.”

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UW Engineering Students Design Plan to Save Library

Posted by Dylan on August 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

As future generations turn through the pages of books at the Monroe Street Library in Madison, Wisconsin, they will have the students of Mike Oliva’s “Special Topics in Engineering” class to thank. Earlier in the year, in response to rising energy costs and a budget shortfall, library officials suggested closing or reducing the open hours at the nearly 50 year-old library. Enter Oliva’s University of Wisconsin engineering class.

The students looked at the building, and found numerous areas where energy efficiency could be improved, ranging from fluorescent light bulbs and double pane windows to placing insulation in the walls. The improvements would result in savings as high as $900 a year, and would save even more in coming years, as energy prices are expected to soar to even higher levels. UW Engineering Students Design Plan to Save Library

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Creative Engineering

Posted by Sheri on August 15th, 2008 | No Comments »

New York University Tisch School of Art Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) is the art department of tomorrow. It is made up of a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists. Together they create alternative media projects that encompass creative design and artistic technology. There are many examples on their website of the types of projects these students create but here is an ideas of what to exspect. A inDOOR Energy Harvester, which makes use of peoples everyday actions to generate and store electricity and a solar bikini that “cools your beer and charges your ipod.”

Filed under Education, Society


Engineering Ethics 101

Posted by Sheri on August 14th, 2008 | No Comments »

The decisions engineers make today, what technology they create and how they use those technologies will have far reaching implications for the future. The New York Times recently focused on the importance of ethical engineering in the article, Handle With Care, which highlighted the roles engineers play in solving environmental problems and creating them. The need for public awareness and increased ethical education and standards in science and engineering is also accentuated in the article.

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WoodWorks Announces Educational Partnership with California Polytechnic University and Other Leading Colleges

Posted by Sheri on August 13th, 2008 | No Comments »

Designing and Building large scale non-residential buildings with wood is not something most engineers and architects take seriously. The Great Chicago Fire can be cited as a pretty good reason why not to use this material. Only 137 year ago the city was destroyed by a major fire which grew in strength primarily because most of the buildings were made of wood. In 2002 a survey was taken of professional architects and engineers regarding the use of wood in major non-residential buildings. Most of the responses were negative and respondents noted building codes and the potential for fire as one of the main reasons the material was not used. Other reasons included, the cost effectiveness and performance of wood versus that of other materials and industry inertia. Woods’ one positive aspect, sustainability, was buried under these other concerns.

Now, Woodworks has just announced a partnership with a number of major universities to help teach future engineers and designers how to use wood as primary material in the construction of non-residential buildings. Sustainability is the main reason that Universities are focusing on the material and ignoring the previously noted drawbacks. However, wood has yet to get much more practicle, so students need to be educated on how to deal with wood’s potential problems (fires, termites, mold and rot) and use wood effectively.

Another sustainable material which would have an interesting application in the construction of green design is recycled plastic, or more specifically recycled plastic lumber. Currently recycled plastic lumber has been a popular material for deck construction and other small scale project but perhaps it would be suited for a bigger future in the construction industry.

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Engineering students compete to build a robo-mower

Posted by Sheri on August 12th, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Lawn-mowing robot

Recently several engineering students from Case Western Reserve competed to build a robo-mower. The students who created this mower took some of the design from biology’s example of a cockroach. While cockroaches don’t have brains, they are good at navigating and avoiding hazards, which is basically what a self guided lawn mower needs to do. To get the machine around the team developed sensors that mimic the tiny hairs and antenna cockroaches use. For instance, instead of hairs to let it know where it is and how fast it’s going, it is equipped with a motion- and acceleration-sensing system. Its’ antenna is a “laser range-finder that sweeps the area ahead of the mower to check for obstacles” and a global positioning system receiver judges the robot’s location.

Filed under Innovation | Tags: ,


UW-Madison engineering students improve Ecuador water quality

Posted by Sheri on August 7th, 2008 | No Comments »

An article recently appeared in the UW-Madison news featuring three civil and environmental engineering students from the University who where able to turn their senior design capstone project into a chance to create a new water pipe-line in Ecuador. These students, Jonathan Blanchard, Kevin Orner and David Tengler designed and implemented the water system after being inspired by their professor, Peter Bosscher. Bosscher had begun work on the pipe-line with UW-Madison Center for Global Health, but passed the project on to his students after being diagnosed with Kidney cancer. Although Bosscher lost his battle to the cancer, his memory will live on in the completed water-system. He was truly a role model to the students who he worked with, motivating them to think about the gloabl implications effective engineering solutions can have.

Related: Going Global in Engineering Education

Filed under Education, Global | Tags:


For Fun

Posted by Sheri on August 4th, 2008 | No Comments »


Let engineers educate you on cats.

Filed under Future


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