Measurement and Instrumentation, Department Of Mechanical Engineering

Measurement and Instrumentation - ‘Go Forth and Measure’

‘Measurement and Instrumentation’ is a mandatory undergraduate class in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The class centers around the semester-long ‘Go forth and measure’ project, where each student conceptualizes a research idea and transforms that idea into a research project (‘On a Mission to Measure’). Then, they spend the semester designing the experiment, collecting and analyzing the data, and then presenting the results in a formal research paper and poster presentation.

I worked with the class from Fall 2020 to December 2023, holding two roles - that of a graduate student TA and Lab Instructor/Lab Prof.

Lab Instructor/Lab Prof

The role of the lab instructor is to act as the research advisor for the undergraduate. Responsibilities included:

• Reviewing research project proposals

• Hold ongoing meetings with students at major project milestones as well as informally as needed to provide guidance on data analysis, data interpretation, and communication of results while also checking for technical accuracy. Responding to evolving project results with recommendations for project direction and next steps.

• Grading major project deliverables (poster and paper) and providing feedback on the communication of results (graphical and written) so that the work is clear, concise, and accurate.

• Overseeing student lab exercises. The core lab exercises teach students techniques for measuring data, applying statistical data analysis techniques to that data, and analyzing the data in the time and frequency domain. A second collection of lab exercises introduces students to measurement methods for a broader set of physical domains beyond that which was the focus of their research project.

I was a lab instructor from September 2021 - May 2022 (Fall and Spring semesters) and September - December 2023 (Fall 2023).I advised a total of 38 student projects.

Graduate Student Teaching Assistant

The graduate student teaching assistant supports the function of the class and research project. My responsibilities included:

• held individual meetings with students to mentor them through turning their proposed idea into a well-defined and feasible experiment objective. Suggested setups and brainstormed data analysis pathways, taking into consideration risk, cost, and scope.

• Reviewed proposed experiment setups and sensor/material requests, assessing the safety, manufacturability, scope, and applicability of proposed sensors to the stated research objective. Made suggestions to improve the likelihood of successful instrumentation build given the stated objective.

• Mentoring them during experiment assembly prototyping, including sensor integration, through to initial data collection, including troubleshooting.

• Assisting students with software debugging and application use for their experimental data - this class uses Vernier (Oregon, USA) as the primary data logging environment and MATLAB as the primary data analysis environment.

• Sensor repair, testing, and construction, where applicable. Document symptoms of malfunction for sensors requiring and capable of repair from an external party.

I was a teaching assistant for the class from September 2020 to May 2021 and from September 2022 to December 2023 (a total of five semesters).

Multi-Domain Instrument and Sensor Experience

The class labs and the student projects required measuring across multiple domains - light, sound, biomechanics, motion tracking, etc. The class device library spanned these domains, accumulated over 20 years of projects and labs. As part of my responsibilities, I instructed students on the devices’ function and operation and assisted them in the interpretation of the collected data. Below is a select list of the instruments and sensors, sorted by domain: