{"id":176615,"date":"2025-12-09T22:12:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T22:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/176615\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T22:12:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T22:12:07","slug":"resurrecting-an-mit-learning-by-doing-tradition-neet-scholars-install-solar-powered-charging-station-mit-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/176615\/","title":{"rendered":"Resurrecting an MIT \u201clearning by doing\u201d tradition: NEET scholars install solar-powered charging station | MIT News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students enrolled in MIT\u2019s New Engineering Education Transformation<\/a> (NEET) program recently collaborated across academic disciplines to design and construct a solar-powered charging station. Positioned in a quiet campus courtyard, the station provides the MIT community with climate-friendly power for phones, laptops, and tablets.<\/p>\n

Its installation marked the \u201cfirst time a cross-departmental team of undergraduates designed, created, and installed on campus a green technology artifact for the public good, as part of a class they took for credit,\u201d says Amitava \u201cBabi\u201d Mitra, NEET founding executive director.<\/p>\n

The project was very on-brand for the NEET program, which centers interdisciplinary, cross-departmental, and project-centric scholarship with experiential learning at its core. Launched in 2017 as an effort to reimagine undergraduate engineering education at MIT, NEET seeks to empower students to tackle complex societal challenges that straddle disciplines.<\/p>\n

The solar-powered charging station project class is an integral part of NEET\u2019s decarbonization-focused Climate and Sustainability Systems (CSS) \u201cthread<\/a>,\u201d one of four pathways of study offered by the program. The class, 22.03\/3.0061 (Introduction to Design Thinking and Rapid Prototyping), teaches the design and fabrication techniques used to create the station, such as laser cutting, 3D printing, computer-aided design (CAD), electronics prototyping, microcontroller programming, and composites manufacturing.<\/p>\n

The project team included students majoring in chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, and nuclear science and engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I really liked about this project was, at the beginning, it was really about ideation, about design, about brainstorming in ways that I haven\u2019t seen before,\u201d says NEET CSS student Aaron\u00a0De Leon, a nuclear science and engineering major focused on clean energy development.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During these brainstorming sessions, the team considered how their subjective design choices for the charging station would shape user experience, something De Leon, who enrolled in the class as a sophomore, says is often overlooked in engineering classes.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s forest-inspired station design \u2014 complete with \u201ctree trunks,\u201d oyster mushroom-shaped desk space, and four solar panels curved to mimic the undulation of the forest canopy \u2014 was intended to evoke a sense of organic connectivity. The tree trunks were crafted from novel flax fiber-based composite layups the team developed through experiments designed to identify more sustainable alternatives to traditional composites.<\/p>\n

The group also discussed how a dearth of device charging options made it difficult for students to work outside, according to NEET CSS student Celestina Pint, who enrolled in the class as a sophomore. The desk space was added to help MIT students work comfortably outdoors while also charging their devices with renewable energy.<\/p>\n

Pint joined NEET because she wanted to \u201ckeep an open approach to climate and sustainability,\u201d as opposed to relying on her materials science and engineering major alone, she says. \u201cI like the interdisciplinary aspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project class presented abundant interdisciplinary learning opportunities that couldn\u2019t be replicated in a purely theory-based curriculum, says Nathan Melenbrink, NEET lecturer, who teaches the project class and is the lead instructor for the NEET CSS thread.<\/p>\n

For example, the team got a crash course in navigating real-world bureaucracy when they discovered that the installation of their charging station had to be approved by more than a dozen entities, including campus police, MIT\u2019s insurance provider, and the campus facilities department.<\/p>\n

The team also gained valuable experience with troubleshooting unanticipated design implementation challenges during the project\u2019s fabrication phase.<\/p>\n

\u201cAdjustments had to be made,\u201d Pint says. Once the station was installed, \u201cit was interesting to see what was the same and what was different\u201d from the team\u2019s initial design.<\/p>\n

This underscores a unique value of the project, according to NEET CSS student Tyler Ea, a fifth-year mechanical engineering major who joined the project team last year and is now a teaching assistant for the class.<\/p>\n

Students \u201care able to take ownership of something physical, like a physical embodiment of their ideas, and something that they can point towards and say, \u2018here\u2019s something that I thought about, and this is how I went about building it, and then here\u2019s the final result,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

While students only become eligible to join NEET in their second year, first-year students interested in the program were also able to learn from the solar-powered charging station project in the first-year discovery class SP.248 (The NEET Experience)<\/a>. After learning fundamental concepts in systems engineering, the class analyzed the station and suggested changes they thought would improve its design.<\/p>\n

Melenbrink says student-built campus installations were once a hallmark of MIT\u2019s academic culture, and he sees the NEET CSS solar-powered charging station project as an opportunity to help revive this tradition.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I hear from the old guard is that there was always somebody \u2026 lugging some giant, odd-looking prototype of something across campus,\u201d Melenbrink says.<\/p>\n

More collaborative, hands-on, student-led climate projects would also help the Institute meet its\u00a0commitment<\/a> to become a leading source of meaningful climate solutions, according to Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and strategic advisor to the\u00a0MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium<\/a> (MCSC).<\/p>\n

\u201cThis local renewable energy project demonstrates that our campus community can learn through solution development,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u201cStudents don\u2019t have to wait until they graduate or enter the job market to make a contribution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students enrolled in this year\u2019s Introduction to Design Thinking and Rapid Prototyping class will fabricate and install a new solar-powered charging station with a unique design. De Leon says he appreciates the latitude NEET students have to make the project their own.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was never the case of a professor saying, \u2018We need to do it this way,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI really liked that ability to learn as many things as you wanted to, and also have the autonomy to make your own design decisions along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students enrolled in MIT\u2019s New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program recently collaborated across academic disciplines to design and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[103696,103695,114,103691,103689,3923,103693,103698,85,46,103692,103684,103685,103687,103682,103683,103697,103686,103690,103694,103688],"class_list":["post-176615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-amitava-babi-mitra","tag-bio-composite","tag-business","tag-composites-manufacturing","tag-cross-departmental","tag-design-thinking","tag-electronics-prototyping","tag-elsa-olivetti","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-microcontroller-programming","tag-mit-class-22-03-3-0061-introduction-to-design-thinking-and-rapid-prototyping","tag-mit-class-sp-248-the-neet-experience","tag-mit-climate-and-sustainability-consortium-mcsc","tag-mit-neet","tag-mit-new-engineering-education-transformation-neet","tag-nathan-melenbrink","tag-neet-climate-and-sustainability-systems","tag-project-centric","tag-rapid-prototyping","tag-solar-charging-station"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}