The OLINformer

December 11, 2006

Attack (not really) of the Wall Walkers… and small children!

Filed under: Life @ Olin, Events @ Olin, Photos — Allison Bahme @ 11:03 pm

Today, the Olin community was a bit larger than normal when 70 4th grade students from Hillside Elementary School in Needham became “Guest Judges” for our Design Nature class (that’s the first-year design component of ICB, our Integrated Course Block, and students use nature as the inspiration/guide for their design projects).
The Design Nature students showed off their toy prototypes this morning in the first floor hallway of the Academic Center. The Olin students were challenged to develop bio-inspired wall walkers for elementary-aged children; the cool part was that the Hillside 4th graders got to evaluate the toys and experience a little bit of Olin!

It was *so* much fun! I almost felt like a kid again! As I wandered back and forth along the AC first floor, it was amazing to see how engaged and excited the Hillside students were - they took their assignments very seriously as they carried their clipboards and moved from team to team, asking questions and rating each design on an evaluation sheet. Rather than just doing a standard presentation, this was a great way for the Design Nature students to explain their designs and see if they appealed/made sense to their target audience.

And now… the requisite pictures! And yes, the team names are rather, er, creative…

Hard-core evaluating goin’ on!

Ryan, Luis, Victoria and Jeff (Team Two Step Program) and their Caterpillar, Senior Meef Quesarito!

Nikki, Marti, Garrett and Heena (Team Hot Glitter Concept)

Daniel, Brian, Ashley and Giulia (Team Nizhegorodov)

Erika, Annie, Amy and Evan (Team Mega Blab) show off their wall walker to Asst. Professor Oscar Mur-Miranda

Ilari, Ben, Julie, Nina and Yifan (Team Walker, Texas Ranger) demo their walker for Asst. Professor Ozgur Eris - “it walked up a 58 degree incline, w00t w00t!” (a direct quote from Ben ‘10)

Evan, Tatiana, Pam and Jenn (Team Verti-Go)

Alyshia, Sarah, Greg and Roland (Team Las Tres Ardillas) get ready to demo their Fire Snail for Oscar - “our fire snail climbed an incline of 42 degrees! woot!” (direct quote from Sarah ‘10)

Andrew ‘07 and Asst. Professor Ben Linder test out another design

Avinash, Matt, Leah, Eric and Chujiao (Team Sky Walkers) demo their Flying Squirrel design for Assoc. Professor Allen Downey - “Our walker was modeled after a flying squirrel (see the parachute on it’s back?). He DID walk up a VERTICAL wall and did GLIDE down to a safe landing on the floor. In fact, I believe we repeated this over thirty times!” (Direct quote from Leah ‘10)