6.810 Engineering Interactive Technologies (fall 2021)
Group Project (4 students per team)
Topic: Big Challenges in the World
The world is a complex place. We face many challenges both on a society level and an individual level. The goal for this semester's project is to build an interactive device that can have an impact either on a group of people or on individuals. There are many websites you can use for inspiration, just google for 'global issues' or 'grand challenges in the world'. Some examples include: climate change, pandemics, obesity, accessibility, education, ageing, population density especially in cities, democracy, social isolation / disconnectedness, food security, refugees, supporting minorities. Really any issue you care deeply about is fine with us as a project topic, as long as it is not something trivial like augmenting your dorm fridge. You have a unique education at MIT, please use it to make the world a better place.
Project Requirements
Your project idea needs to fullfill the following requirements:
- The project needs to have custom fabricated parts, electronics, and a software component. Projects that are missing one of these components are not valid for 6.810. You can however choose where you want to put your main focus, i.e. some projects may be heavy on the fabrication and electronics while others may be more heavy on the software part.
- The project needs to use fabrication technology your learned in class, i.e. it should not just be the standard breadboard prototype but have a nicely integrated form factor with printed or sprayed electronics, a 3D printed or laser cut casing where appropriate etc. This is your senior year, so try to make your prototype look as professional as you can. We recommend you review the lecture slides to look for different technologies you could experiment with.
- The project idea needs to be big enough to warrant a 4 person team working on it for 6 weeks. Note that each week you will be putting in ca. 6 hours per person, so this should be 4 student x 6 hours per week x 5 weeeks = 120 person hours worth of work.
Your Task: Design and build an novel interactive device that addresses a big challenge of your choice
During this group project, you will:
- brainstorm different ideas and select one for your project
- build the physical prototype including all fabrication and electronics assembly
- program the code for your physical prototype, ideally you would also have some on-screen visualization of the sensor data that your prototype is processing
- present your prototype well, i.e. make a rotoscope of your prototype, take high quality photos, and make a video (we will teach you more about this later in the semester)
Grading
The project grade makes up 40% of your final grade.
You can get 100pts on your project, distributed across the following parts:
| 15% | Idea Presentation | Quality of the Brainstorming and Presentation of the Brainstorming Results. How diverse are the different ideas (different application domains, different types of problems)? Are the ideas challenging, i.e. go significantly beyond what we already did in the labs, are appropriate as a team project (i.e. 4 student x 6 hours per week x 5 weeks worth of work), and do the ideas use a variety of different technologies? Are the ideas presented in an easily understandable way, i.e. how clear are the conceptual drawings, are key components labeled to facilitate understanding? |
| 15% | Technical Proposal | Does the plan to build the prototype cover all the details of the implementation? How well did the team justify the particular implementation? Did the team consider other options in detail and showed that they reflected on alternative options? Is the minimum viable product really the minimum or are there still additional parts that could be left out? How much potential do the future extensions for this project have? Is the component list complete and did the team reflect in detail which components they need and why? How well is the milestone plan done, are the todos properly distributed across the different weeks or are time-intensive tasks all done in one week? Are the milestones covering all aspects of what needs to be build or were things forgotten? |
| 25% (ca. 4% per milestone, 6 milestones) | Weekly Milestones | Did the team deliver the milestones as specified the week prior? Are the videos showing the milestone results uploaded on time and are the milestones for the following week revised before the staff meeting? Did the milestone have an appropriate number of workhours (i.e. 6 hours per student) or was it too simple, in which case we may take half the points off. |
| 15% | Midterm Presentation | While the weekly milestones will only check if you did something that was appropriate for the weekly work required by each student (i.e., did you do the work or not), the midterm presentation will be graded by the quality of the work you accomplished so far and how much progress you have made towards the overall project goal. We will look at what you set out to do in your technical proposal, and ask ourselves how much of the described work and at what quality you have delivered results so far? The midterm happens when around 2/3rds of the time for the project is already over, so we expect that you either already have a minimum viable product or are very close to it. In addition, we will consider the presentation quality in this grade portion as well. |
| 20% | Final Presentation | The final presentation is graded similar to the midterm presentation, i.e. we will look at what you set out to do in your technical proposal, and ask ourselves how much of the described work and at what quality you have delivered in your final presentation. In addition, we will consider the presentation quality in this grade portion as well. |
| 10% (2.5% each) | Rotoscope, Photos, Video | The final portion of your project grade will come from your presentation materials. We will grade each part of the presentation materials individually. For the rotoscope, we will grade how understandable your drawing is (did you use the techniques described in the rotoscope tutorial, did you label everything sufficiently to facilitate understanding), for the photos we will grade the quality of the picture (i.e. did you use a clean background, does the photo show the important components clearly), for the video we will grade how well it explains your project and the implementation you used. |
Buying Materials
Budget:
$50 per student ($200 per team of four students)
Ordering Parts
Option 1: We order for you: If you want to order a part, add a line for your part to this google spreadsheet. We'll make daily orders at the start of the project period, and additional orders later as needed. For inexpensive parts, plan for breakage. If a part costs $2, order more than you'll need to so minimize downtime from re-ordering.
Option 2: You order yourself: You can also buy parts on your own and we can try to reimburse you later (not recommended, lots of extra work for both you and the teaching team). Note that you will be given or mailed a physical check in January as reimbursement. We need all paper receipts from you in order to reimburse you and the parts need to be shipped to Junyi Zhu, MIT CSAIL, 32 Vassar Street, 32-273, Cambridge, MA 02139. Parts ordered to your home address cannot be reimbursed as MIT will not understand why we should reimburse you for 'personal' orders you shipped to your room or apartment.
3) Free Parts
Small parts like resistors, capacitors, some types of LEDs and certain chips, we will already have in stock (or you can ask EDS), so they don't count towards your budget.
Team Folders in Google Drive
1) Project Folder (Google Drive)
Each team will be given their own folder to share materials with each other and with the teaching staff. Your team folder is where you'll upload project proposal, final report, code, etc.
Weekly Milestone Meetings
Since 6.08 is a prerequisit, you should be familiar with this milestone structure.
Fill out Milestone Spreadsheet: Every week you will write down what you plan to accomplish during the week in a milestone spreadsheet. You will also write down what you will demo to the teaching team to showcase that you successfully accomplished your goal for the week.
Prepare for Milestone meetings with Staff: Before you will come to the staff meeting, you will make a short video demonstrating your milestone and upload it to your team folder google drive in the corresponding milestone folder. This will speed up the process of us learning what is new this week. Please use Handbrake or a similar tool to compress your video before putting it in the google drive (otherwise we need a ton of storage).
Milestone meetings with Staff (20 min per team): Every friday you will meet for approximately 20 minutes with the teaching team. You can find the weekly meeting time for your team in this document. At the meeting, we will spend the first 10 minutes looking at your results. We will then spend the next 10 minutes discussing any issues you may have and your plans for next week.
