When the deceased professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers SM ’68, Meng ’71, doctorate ’73 was a student of MIT, most of his classes concerned paper exercises and a pencil with previously specific solutions. The flowers had a affinity to do things and work. When he went from student to teacher, he decided to conduct this approach to his teaching method and, he helped change the way of developing engineering students – in MIT and all over the world.
Flowers died in 2019, but his heritage lives, and the size of the educational revolution helped evolve, was deep
In the seventies, Flowers took over the 2,70 manual, currently called class 2.007 (design and production I). The Capstone course is the one whom many first -year students expect today, but this has not always been so. Before Flowers took over the instructions, the class instructions largely consisted of demonstrations of the board.
“Their idea of designing at that time was to draw drawings of parts,” explains the retired Professor David Gossard ’75, longtime friend and colleague Flowers. “Woody had a different idea. Give the whole class a set of materials [and] A common goal that consisted in building a machine – climbing to the hill, raising golf balls or whatever it did – and organize a competition. It was a phenomenal success. The children loved, the lecturer loved it, the institute loved it. And for several years it happened, I think that it can be said that the institution is reliable. “
With flowers on the conduct of 2.70 it transformed into a project based on a second -hand project, focused on robotics. According to all relationships, he made experience incredibly comical – something he valued in his life. He liked parachute jumps and often saw it in an unbelievable corridor. The course, informed about his unique style, was at the forefront of the engineering education revolution and quickly helped strengthen the reputation of the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the field of groundbreaking education.
“Many children have never started from scratch and did not build anything,” said Flowers once. His adviser Robert Mann had similar beliefs in practical, state-of-the-art pedagogy. Based on Mann’s philosophy and including his own approach, Flowers breathed a recent life and was a recent basis for “myth way” teaching. It was reinigating in the right place and the right time, which ultimately had a global impact on the popularity of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
“Over the years, lectures displaced practical things, and Woodie restored them,” says Sanjay Sarma, Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) in mechanical engineering. “I can’t come up with one person who influenced the field of robotics and design at a bachelor’s school or high school, just like Woodie.”
Flowers became interested in mechanical engineering and design at a adolescent age, largely thanks to parents. His father was a welder with a passion for DIY, inventing and building, his mother was a teacher at primary school. The flowers grew up dismantling things and putting them back – an action that seemed to make students better engineers.
In 2010 with the Institute’s digital archive, thanks to the generosity of Jane and A. Neil Pappalardo ’64, The flowers shared history About a student who took the task in his group to determine whether the steel reinforcement can be bent into a tight loop and serve as a placenta.
“She came to the laboratory, and I was there early, and she had a slightly bent piece of reinforcement. It was heated – it could be said that it was hot, and she intended to inform that she couldn’t really do it, it just didn’t work – says Flowers. He suggested that they try a different approach.
“We left in the laboratory and found another immense steel bar and found the biggest disadvantage I could find,” he continued. The flowers turned the reinforcement against a piece of steel, which he intended to wrap it, and then took a four -speed hammer to it. “My father had a blacksmith, so it was known to me. I wrapped [the rebar around the steel and] I made a tiny placenta. When I finished my last blow, I looked up, and three best students in the classroom – really sharpened people – stood there with an open jaw. They never saw anyone hit a piece of steel enough to just shape it. “
He continued: “This visceral understanding of mechanics’ behavior is really crucial. He does not fall out of heaven and certainly does not leave the textbook, it comes from real interaction. I believe that I was lucky because when I met Castiglione about the bending of materials, it made sense. “
The 2.70/2.007 course is considered a breakthrough class of engineering education. It was one of the first practical classes that taught students not only the method of designing the facility, but also how to build it and, showing the value of practical, based on designs of learning and robotics competitions, this affected the approach used by many other programs. Today, it still develops the competence and confidence of students as design engineers, with an emphasis on the creative process of designing strengthened by the application of physical provisions, reliability and production.
In particular, the course also served as an inspiration for the development of the first robotics program, which Flowers and inventor Dean Kamen began in 1989. First, he has programs for kindergarten by high school students, and so far over 3.2 million young people from over 100 countries have participated in the first competitions.
In the seventies, the set for parts – or how they bloom, “garbage bag” – contained things such as springs, tongue and elastic depressors. The wife of Flowers, Margaret, remembers spending many nights at packing these sets and organizing advisers in their home. “We considered ourselves a band,” he says.
Today, in addition to using a set of parts and mechanical materials, students in 2.007 can develop 3D printed components and include electronics in their robots to obtain the autonomous final part of the competition.
In the Spring 2024 competition, on the subject of the popular animated science science fiction with Cartoon Network “Rick and Morty”, it contained a spaceship with which students’ works could interact with points for points, vigance of “acid” in which the balls could be collected and placed in tubes, and game elements that they paid tribute to the iconic episodes. The final task required the robot to travel up the elevator and send the characters down the Zipline cable.
In recent years, other topics have focused on tasks related to stories, from “Star Wars” to “Back to the Future” and “Wakanda Forever”. Topic 2022, however, could be the most poignant theme: “Heritage”, Festival of Life and Work of Flowers.
“[Woodie] clearly revealed that the design, production, assembly and building things were comical, “says Gossard. “It was probably the essence of engineering. She was cheerful in that. “