In this video adapted from NASA, two members of a NASA research team working to produce carbon nanotubes share some background behind this new technology, show examples of how it will be useful, and explain the various tests being performed to ensure readiness for spaceflight.

Students learn about stress and strain by designing and building beams using polymer clay. They compete to find the best beam strength to beam weight ratio, and learn about the trade-offs engineers make when designing a structure.

This course addresses advanced structures, exterior envelopes and contemporary production technologies. It continues the exploration of structural elements and systems, and expands to include more complex determinate, indeterminate, long-span and high-rise systems. It covers topics such as reinforced concrete, steel and engineered wood design, and provides an introduction to tensile systems. Lectures also address the contemporary exterior envelope with an emphasis on their performance attributes and advanced manufacturing technologies. This course is required of MArch students.

This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, and construction of basic structural systems as well as an introduction to energy issues in buildings. It emphasizes basic systematic and elemental behavior, principles of structural behavior, and analysis of individual structural elements and strategies for load carrying. The course also introduces fundamental energy topics including thermodynamics, psychrometrics, and comfort. It is a required class for M. Arch. students.

In this video segment from PEEP and the Big Wide World, children make a dam with dirt, sticks, and stones to try to stop the flow of water.

How do you build a tunnel 32 miles long -- under water? This video segment adapted from Building Big, follows the construction of the Channel Tunnel (nicknamed "Chunnel"), the engineering wonder that connects England to France.

This video excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff: Cleaner and accompanying demonstration introduce students to the production and importance of bioplastics, or plastics made from plant or animal products.

Students apply their knowledge of linear regression and design to solve a real-world challenge to create a better packing solution for shipping cell phones. They use different materials, such as cardboard, fabric, plastic, and rubber bands to create new “composite material” packaging containers. Teams each create four prototypes made of the same materials and constructed in the same way, with the only difference being their weights, so each one is fabricated with a different amount of material. They test the three heavier prototype packages by dropping them from different heights to see how well they protect a piece of glass inside (similar in size to iPhone 6). Then students use linear regression to predict from what height they can drop the fourth/final prototype of known mass without the “phone” breaking. Success is not breaking the glass but not underestimating the height by too much either, which means using math to accurately predict the optimum drop height.

In the exploration of ways to use solar energy, students investigate the thermal energy storage capacities of different test materials to determine which to use in passive solar building design.

Students are introduced to chemical engineering and learn about its many different applications. They are provided with a basic introduction to matter and its different properties and states. An associated hands-on activity gives students a chance to test their knowledge of the states of matter and how to make observations using their five senses: touch, smell, sound, sight and taste.

Working in engineering project teams, students evaluate sites for the construction of a pyramid. They base their decision on site features as provided by a surveyor's report; distance from the quarry, river and palace; and other factors they deem important to the project based on their team's values and priorities.

Introduction to citations as a presentation. Citing data and code as well as getting citations for data and code.

This interactive resource adapted from the National Park Service describes the different kinds of sediments that make up coastlines, with a focus on the variety in color, size, and sorting.

Watch the ZOOM cast find out how many balloons filled with air and then with water are required to support the weight of a cast member.

In this video segment, members of the ZOOM cast experiment by bending and folding sheets of paper into various shapes to see which shape will support the weight of a heavy book.

In this video segment from ZOOM, Hillary, from Randolph, MA, takes us on a tour of the columns in her neighborhood.

16.225 is a graduate level course on Computational Mechanics of Materials. The primary focus of this course is on the teaching of state-of-the-art numerical methods for the analysis of the nonlinear continuum response of materials. The range of material behavior considered in this course includes: linear and finite deformation elasticity, inelasticity and dynamics. Numerical formulation and algorithms include: variational formulation and variational constitutive updates, finite element discretization, error estimation, constrained problems, time integration algorithms and convergence analysis. There is a strong emphasis on the (parallel) computer implementation of algorithms in programming assignments. The application to real engineering applications and problems in engineering science is stressed throughout the course.

This webinar (recorded Sept. 27, 2017) introduces how to connect other services as add-ons to projects on the Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io). Connecting services to your OSF projects via add-ons enables you to pull together the different parts of your research efforts without having to switch away from tools and workflows you wish to continue using. The OSF is a free, open source web application built to help researchers manage their workflows. The OSF is part collaboration tool, part version control software, and part data archive. The OSF connects to popular tools researchers already use, like Dropbox, Box, Github and Mendeley, to streamline workflows and increase efficiency.

This video will go over three issues that can arise when scientific studies have low statistical power. All materials shown in the video, as well as the content from our other videos, can be found here: https://osf.io/7gqsi/

We design and create objects to make our lives easier and more comfortable. The houses in which we live are excellent examples of this. Depending on your local climate, the features of your house have been designed to satisfy your particular environmental needs: protection from hot, cold, windy and/or rainy weather. In this activity, students design and build model houses, then test them against various climate elements, and then re-design and improve them. Using books, websites and photos, students learn about the different types of roofs found on various houses in different environments throughout the world.