Going head to head
‘150 years of MIT’ is a series that looks at specific people and moments from MIT’s 150-year history and explains their lasting effect on the Institute, the nation and the world. See the full interactive timeline at the MIT150 site.If you walk in to MIT’s Johnson Athletic Center on a certain evening at the end of the spring semester, the sounds coming from the throng inside — bursts of clapping, footstomping and cheering — would lead you to assume that you’re approaching an athletic event. And in a sense, the finale of the class called 2.007, “Introduction to Design and Manufacturing,” is indeed a kind of athletic competition, except that the participants out on the playing field are all robots, designed and built in one semester by teams of students, and they are carrying out tasks such as collecting balls or blocks in one place and carrying them to a...