2.150 & 2.70
This week MIT threw a birthday party for their mechanical engineering department (aka Course 2). It’s 150 years old this year.
We stopped by and went on tours of several of the labs. 150 years ago they would have featured giant boilers and steam engines. In my day there would have been a lot big machine tools. Today they’re mostly 3D printers and things like carbon nanotubes. We had a great time talking to several of the researchers. We also visited the shop where they do projects for the design courses, including the famous toy class.
There was also a big poster session where students were showing off some of the cool projects they’d been working on this semester.
There was also the presentation of student awards for the year, and a panel discussion with recent alums about their time in course 2 helped their careers.
But the highlight was what we used to call the 2.70 contest (called 2.007 these days). That’s the final for the big mechanical design class that everyone in course 2 takes. It ends with a competition to determine who’s machine works best. This has been one of the highlights of campus life at MIT for more than fifty years. In my day it was run by Woody Flowers, who later helped create the similar First Robotics competitions.
The first one I went to was in 1977. The room was packed and everyone was cheering for their favorite. I was cheering for my friend Aldo Spadoni‘s wonderful little black dragon. This is what it looked like a couple of years later:
Nowadays things have gotten a bit bigger and fancier. The competition is different every year. This year was a Rick & Morty theme. An old friend of mine was an instructor this year, so he took us on an up close tour of the playing field and talked about how they built it.
The competitors had a number of different tasks they could do to score points. Each match was 2 minutes long. For the first 30 seconds the machine were autonomous, but they could be run by remote control after that. The competition was pretty fierce.
The best match was this one in the semifinals:
It was really nice to get back there and see everything that had changed since our time there. We had a great time seeing old friends and meeting some new ones.
