An Intro to Engineering (and Northeastern) With Professor Davis

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

Hi. My name is Dr Davis, and I'm a professor here at Northeastern, Uh, teach Professor different than normal professors. Where instead of having research outside of class and research lab that we run, we focus entirely on our students. So here I teach to classes cornerstones of engineering one and two. In order to make sure the best that I could be, all of my attention are focused on teaching those the best that I can see the way they work is cornerstone is that classroom. So it doesn't matter what made you are, you're always going to take our stuff way teach to programming languages. People spots in that lab to cad languages, AutoCAD and salt works, engine design and entering ethics. We got to tie the whole thing together with a theme. So each each of my colleagues in the in the first year engineering program has different teams. So all of my students making escape room, if you don't know this paper missed, the basic idea is a cooperative activity where you are trapped in a room and you must solve all the puzzles In order to escape, my students will make all of those individual puzzles will stream to it. We'LL string it together with the narrative and with a flow so that you have to have some sort of design. What order? Resolving the puzzles, How hard they're gonna be easy. What are we actually gonna do with them? And then we build way have actual wood constructs you could see to my side. We have a number of wooden objects here, and these are all things that we will use in our escape rooms in the end of the year. We run event for basically an entire Saturday and have all all of our community members and very students and faculty all come and try to play through what my students made. What inspired you to take the leap and have students create escape rooms rather than some other project? So in my nonexistent free time, I run a core game design and publishing company, and through that, I got an eye for making products and crafting clay experiences that are really engaging user. When I turned my eyes towards engineering, I realized that I need to something that was more build heavy something where, as an engineer, you can really cut some wood and get some some experience working with there tens. So we want to make something bigger and more complicated than a Borgia. So when I was looking at what the different kinds of experiences they are that offer and engaging experience escape proof. When we started looking at the different pieces of what it would take a bullet and put it together, I worked with another professor here, Mark, see back to craft the original theme and put together what the requirements would be. We're able to map it to our different course material by making the requirements required different pieces. For example, if we make our students laser cut something or three D print something, then we can use AutoCAD and solid retrospectively to accomplish those goals. If we use our doing the hardware, then we can make our students program and see in order to make their Drina run functional. By mapping the different requirements of what their puzzles need to contain to the things that were teaching class, we can engage our students in a multiple different directions. What is your favorite thing about Northeastern Slash teaching your students here and what might make teaching at North Eastern different than taking out another university? So I love our collaborative environment. Can we work out some time to work on it? Being ableto works on something interdisciplinary nature. I'm a chemical engineer by training, and I get to work with material engineers with mechanical in tears with industrial engineers, and we all get to work together. Way have a beautiful maker space where we get to put our students to work in making all these wonderful things, as well as having access to a lot of tools and a lot of skilled technical personnel as well staff. It's extremely supportive, and so I think that it's very helpful to have your wonderful environment working in. I absolutely love my job, my colleagues, and that's entirely the community that we've built here in our Easter in terms of what makes it different. I think that every university will have different pockets that are going to make it really interesting and really fun to be out with Northeastern feeling that pocket is so much bigger. It's not just my immediate colleagues, but the whole Internet community, the whole college that I get to work with. Finally, I would like to ask you to give a brief summary of your pH deep work. So when I was a phD student, I was a couple engineer. So when I was looking for different projects, I end up stumbling upon one that used, uh, treating to make polymer or gone. So the basic idea is if we take Tricky Dick and we put a black light on it, and then we shine a light on top of it, then the black line will absorb beating faster, and it'LL heat up faster. Then because the hot the top is getting hot fastening bottom, the top is gonna shrink. The bottom's not no calls to fold, and so you can imagine if you took a rubber band and put it on, you stretched it, You put it, freezer, he frozen. So instead of just doing it, intricate and congestion in polystyrene were able to do a whole variety of different materials and on a lot of different scales. So this is a crane that I made as part of my phD research made out of a Thrilla, using a laser cutter toe changes into the side of it and then using rubber band in a fully sized oven to create the necessary heat and pressure ingredients to cause it to fold. So coming up with these three dimensional objects was a really wonderful way for me to combine chemical engineering, polymer knowledge, material science and Mika and mechanical engineer all together to make a call.