Engineering students demonstrate product prototypes
Whether you’re planning to ride a horse or a motorcycle, compete in swimming or wrestling, do some yoga or sell some veggies, organize your workshop or calm an elderly relative, MIT’s mechanical engineering students may be able to help you do it better.Before a raucous crowd in MIT’s Kresge Auditorium on Monday night, eight teams of students in the capstone course for mechanical engineering majors — 2.009: Product Engineering Processes — presented their projects from this semester. Many of these prototypes — despite being conceived, designed, and tested over just three months — appeared to be almost ready for the marketplace.The presentations provided quite a spectacle, including a live horse on the Kresge stage. The horse was there to demonstrate a product designed to reduce the risk of injury to horses engaged in competitions.The horse, named Pinky, stood patiently as the team explained their invention, a set of specially equipped...