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Winter Quarter 2009 Course Announcement
David L. Jaffe, MS and
Professor Drew Nelson |
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Call for Project Ideas, Coaches, and Partners
I am contacting you to solicit student project ideas for assistive technology courses at Stanford University this coming academic year. The third season of Perspectives in Assistive Technology (ENGR110/210) will be offered in the Winter Quarter, starting in January. This class explores the engineering, medical, technical, and psychosocial challenges of implementing technology solutions for people with disabilities through lectures by experts in the fields of assistive technology and rehabilitation. In addition, teams of students work with project partners, coaches, and individuals with disability to identify assistive technology needs and formulate design solutions that they will then build in a senior design course in the Spring. ME113 is the capstone course for undergraduate mechanical engineering senior students enrolled in the three-quarter design sequence. In this course, student teams design, fabricate, and test a working model. (Not all ME113 projects involve assistive technology.) Course instructors, coaches with industrial design experience, and persons with disabilities advise student teams with projects that benefit individuals with disabilities. In the past several years, many projects involving assistive technology have been undertaken. For example, previous years' ENGR110/210 projects were:
The best projects typically win national design awards, even when competing against year-long design courses at other schools. At this time, I would like to solicit your project ideas for these courses. Projects must be of an appropriate scale so that they can be completed in 20-weeks (10-weeks each for Winter and Spring Quarters). The students in these courses have backgrounds in mechanical engineering and some may also have considerable computer hardware and software experience. In addition, the cost of any parts or fabrication must be modest, no more than a few thousand dollars. Projects must represent real-word problems inadequately addressed by commercial products.
This is an excellent opportunity to have bright students work on a project that solves a long-standing problem experienced by people with disabilities. Your assistance is also sought for the names of local individuals who would benefit from the finished product as well as experts who would be able to coach the students on their projects. The experts would be expected to provide advice and expertise in the specific area addressed by the project and be available by phone and/or email. Finally support for these projects is needed. A fee of $5000 per project supports approved project expenses and helps defray administrative costs. Contributions of lesser amounts will also be considered. Please contact me if you have any questions about the courses and thank you for your project suggestions.
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