Challenger Explosion

 

In the Human Side of Technology, one of my January session classes, Ralph Katz discussed the challenger incident. Last week was the 25th anniversary of the accident. It was really interesting to see an inside perspective on how the events occurred. We only saw part of the story of course (we never get the full story), the best part was when the Morton Thiokol senior VP tells Bob Lund (VP of engineering) to take off his engineers hat and put on his management hat….ouch. The decision of giving NASA the OK to launch in such cold weather knowing there could be an issue with the O-rings led to one of the most well known Shuttle explosions in history. Also this story illustrates how sometimes the technical knowledge is not always the most relevant, knowing how to communicate and making sound decisions by taking into consideration the human factor is critical.

You can checkout the story here: http://history.nasa.gov/sts51l.html

And some videos: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/movies/movies.html

Design Challenge 1

 

   Below I am posting some links to Design Challenge 1 that has some videos one of the SDM 10 students made. We were tasked to build a robot out of Lego NXT´s to compete in several tasks. Around the end of the event we realized the challenge had less to do with building robots than it did about building relationships. The team went through the High Performance Team phases: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing rather quickly and helped us get to know our cohort better. My team was Team 9: Astroboy, the challenge was titled battle of the superheroes so we had to name our robot after a superhero. My favorite part was the presentations or Demo/Parade.

   The challenge made me realize how important it is to build relationships in order to work effectively as a team. The task put into perspective some of the personal network building principles we were taught. In order for networks to be useful, one must actively participate in the network, in other words: give your personal network maintenance. I think that will be the real challenge more than forming a personal network.

Cheers!!

It Begins…

 

So I finally arrived in Boston last Sunday, and the first week at SDM is over. Today is my first day off and I have a terrible headache but I do want to recap the weeks events.

Monday: First we received a welcome from both Sloan and the Engineering department to the SDM program. The rest of the day was mainly the cohort presentations where everybody introduced themselves. We also had a talk from the IT guys to get help with setting up the computer to use the MIT computing services. And finally we were introduced to Design Challenge 1 (DC1) by a group of SDM 10 students who called themselves “the elves”.

Tuesday: We started up with a team building event that lasted all morning. We were grouped with our DC1 team and did some integration activities to get to know each other better. We also went over some high performing team principles mainly the Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing phases of a team. Finally we did a competition which taught us to cooperate between team, we never could have gone so far in the game without working together with the other teams. This activities taught us an important lesson which was termed Co-opetition. We also had a talk on what we required to be cleared from the International Students Office so we could get our MIT student ID and later we went through the remaining cohort presentations and finished up working on our DC1.

Wednesday: We had our first class called the Human Side of Technology with Ralph Katz. Then we had a briefing of financial matters with Jeff Shao who explained the complicated paying scheme of MIT. Later the International Student Committee gave us some pointers on student life and also some pointers on how to dress for the picture book and interviews. The rest of the day we continued with DC1.

Thursday: We had another lecture from Ralph Katz, then Pat Hale explained the different program options for the SDM curriculum. There is a Leadership option I may be interested in but I need more information about it since I will be a distance commuter. At the end of the day we continued working on DC1.

Friday: Friday we had a Personal Networking Seminar from a previous student (John) who gave some insight into building a strong personal network. Then we had an introduction to Systems Thinking from Ed Crawley. I believe ESD.34 Systems Architecture will be one of the main classes for the SDM program, it will be tough but also very rewarding. After lunch we had a probability and statistics class (ESD.301) which was mainly an overview of basic concepts, more of a refresher if you have ever taken probability. And then we continued working on DC1.

Saturday: This day was the event, we had the Design Challenge competition which was mainly building a robot that would compete in 3 different events: a Parade or Demo, a shooting game both attacking and defending, and finally a sumo match. Top 6 teams would go on to the semifinal and then  final. I will write another blog about the DC1 in the future and try to post links to videos of the event. In the evening we had an event that “the elves” organized to watch the Colts face off against the Jets and get a little distraction from working on DC1.

Have a good day.