Last week, several Arcturus members had the opportunity to run the Discover Ocean Engineering program for incoming freshmen. It was a wonderful week filled with fun, robots, and plenty of food!
Over the week, students built their own underwater remotely operated vehicles called Sea Perches. From soldering control boards to potting motors in silicone to building PVC chassis, students were able to see their entire robot come together from scratch. For many, this was their first time learning to solder and cut PVC, so we had plenty of tutorials. For their final challenge, they competed head-to-head in the Sea Perch Olympics, where they were challenged with popping each other’s balloons and pushing over floaties and sinkers into the opposite “end zone” before time was up! At the end of each round, the points were tallied and we’d move the winners up the bracket. We saw some really cool designs come out of this, since each ROV needed to balance being maneuverable while also maximizing their opportunity to collect the floaties and sinkers. They really made use of all the parts we had in lab, adding netting and push pins! At the end of the week, the students got to take home their sea perches!
Over the course of the week, we had several talks from industry experts and MIT faculty. In particular, Michael S Triantafyllou (the head of the OE department) spoke about the importance of ocean engineering as a field of study to protect the environment, highlighting interesting examples of bio-inspired or naval engineering. Peter Godart (CEO of Found Energy) talked about his work on aluminum fuel developing an economical way to recycle materials while providing clean energy and fresh water. And finally, Keith Ellenbogen showed us his photos/videos of underwater creatures, including fish, jellyfish, and sharks!
On Wednesday, we got a tour of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. There we saw a bunch of autonomous underwater vehicles, which taught students how important buoyancy, communications, and pressure are in shaping the vehicle design. We then walked down to the docks, where we saw the Mayflower 400, an autonomous boat by ProMare which collects data which informs us of critical issues such as climate change, ocean plastic pollution and marine mammal conservation.
Afterwards, we drove to Natick where we had a night of games at Level99, which is a mix of an escape room and arcade. It was a fun mix of physical and mental challenges, with rooms requiring some combination of teamwork, verbal communication, strategy, dexterity, or strength!
To finish off the program, we went to View Boston on the Prudential center tower, which was beautiful and had a really neat projection of the Boston skyline!
