ChaCha found out about me through a mutual friend. She was interested in working on personal projects and doing well in school (Mens et Manus.) After looking through my website she asked to work with me on making a nameplate. The focus of this work was on teaching (sketches, CAD, spec'ing out parts, manufacturing, debugging, etc.) rather than just making something quickly. It's a work in progress.
As a 2.007 UA, I helped students in Pappalardo labs build robots. For most, this was their first engineering experience, so I focused on the importance of planning, sketching, CAD, analysis, BLEs, and manufacturing.
The International Design Contest is an event that brings together the best and brightest mechanical engineers from nine different countries to collaborate and compete in a robotics competition. The location of the competition changes every year; in 2011 it was held at MIT. I was an Undergraduate Assistant for this program, helping students from all over the world build robots.
Discover Mechanical Engineering is a week-long program that exposes freshmen to various aspects of Mechanical Engineering, such as research and manufacturing. In 2010, I was a mentor for this program.
Ever since I did MITES (Minority Introduction To Engineering and Science) in 2007, I wanted to come back and be a TA. MITES was a life changing experience for me and I wanted to share that experience with others. When I got the job as an Engineering Design TA for MITES 2010, I thought the summer was going to be really chill. Little did I know that being a TA would be just as rewarding, eye-opening, life changing and in my case just as much work as being a MITES student.
Spark is basically Splash, but in the spring. Learning from the mistakes I made in teaching Splash 2008, I split teaching into two classes: one on Rubik's Cubes and one on more advanced topics, including optimizing the performance of the 3x3 cube, larger cubes (4x4, 5x5, etc.) as well as higher dimensional cubes (4D and 5D.)
Splash is a program where local high school and middle school students come to MIT to learn anything that MIT students are willing to teach. In 2008, I taught a class called, "How to solve a Rubik's Cube."