TABLE OF CONTENTS Misce stultitiam consilis brevem: Dulce est desipere in loco. [Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: it is good to be silly at the right moment]
Horace, Odes, Book 4, 27 BCE
Professor Rosalind Williams in her book [5.1] about the influence of social and technical change on the academic culture at MIT remarks about her maternal grandfather, Warren Kendall Lewis, the founding professor of chemical engineering at that institute:
Grandpa Lewis thought of himself as a farm boy. As professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he would often try to get some engineering point across by telling a funny story about a country schoolteacher or about an apocryphal Cousin Willie. A teacher's job, he said, was to "get the fodder down on the ground where the calves could get at it."
Although Williams' book is partly about the gradual blurring of boundaries between science and technology at MIT, she admits that designing and building structures and machines is still the domain of the engineer. MaT projects provide excellent opportunities for engineering undergraduates to experience encapsulated engineering design and construction, with the accompanying, almost instant, gratification of testing their ideas in "practice". The educator's dilemma remains that of making the experience one of learning as well as gratification. To this end the following examples present some sample formats for designing and constructing static MaT projects.
[5.1]Williams, R. (2002).
The following MaT projects are representative examples for use with...
