Open House

It was Saturday afternoon, a nice spring day, so I wondered if anybody would show up for MIT's Open House. As far as I could tell from the crowd in the Stata Center, everybody showed up. The place was packed.  I ran into President Hockfield, who said  it was like that all over campus. In the Stata Center, the demonstrations of cutting-edge stuff included next-generation robots. There were robots all over the place. There were robots that walked, robots that flew, and robots that sensed your mood.

But for me, being an Electrical Engineering major when I was an undergraduate, the best part was the motor table. The around 10 set gathered around to play with motors made from paper cups, permanent magnets, s-shaped wire rotor mounts, loops of magnet wire, and a bit of electrical tape.

One especially curious kid turned to a parent and asked, “How do they work?” To the parent's relief, a friendly student demonstrator came to the rescue, explaining the careful scratching of the insulation on one side of the rotor wire where it came in contact with the rotor mounts. The rotor is powered half way around; it coasts the other half.

My guess is that the kid will write about the day six or eight years from now. It will be part of her answer to the why-do-you-want-to-come-to-MIT question.