Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is showing off a new lab meant to allow collaboration between students and faculty.
Housed on the sixth floor of the Jonsson Engineering Center, the Mercer XLab is a new space for students and staff to hone their engineering skills. It’s equipped with computers, lab stations, collaborative seating, and tools, and all students can access the lab to create.
Shayla Sawyer, inaugural director of the lab, says it’s a space for students to collaborate and share ideas with classmates and staff. The lab, which was made possible by a $2 million donation by 1977 graduate Douglas Mercer, was launched in 2022 as a way to promote non-traditional teaching methods and encourage learning outside of the classroom. The grand opening was celebrated Wednesday.
“What is the jazz of engineering,” Sawyer said. “Often, classical engineering is textbook based, is a lecturer kind of standing up and telling you these fundamental details. The jazz of engineering is the ability to hone your skills, be in a space with other people with different skills for different instruments, and then innovate together without knowing what the end is going to be, without knowing what the song is. And I think that kind of improvisational learning is a huge opportunity to deepen fundamentals.”
Sawyer says the lab’s innovative approach reflects RPI’s 200-year history of reinventing scientific and technological education.
“This is about spreading the ideas of anything electronic and spreading it to any student and faculty and staff, we often find students, even in architecture, in business and music, in the arts, are often integrating electronics into whatever they're doing and need help and need some kind of guidance. This is what this lab is for, far beyond engineering,” Sawyer said.
Giving tours of the lab to students is Beansprout. The robot was programmed in part by Thomas Byrne, a senior studying computer and systems engineering.
It brings students through the lab and will eventually even be able to register them for the lab. Byrne explains:
“It doesn't look like much, but it has a ton of capabilities within and in terms of software, the software is extremely refined and advanced,” Byrne said. “It can navigate any room. It can map 3D spaces. It has a deep neural network within it that is capable of machine learning. So, it can automatically understand speech already. It can translate any anything you say to text and then parse that. So, what we're doing with it here is we wanted to show the space in a new and unique way, and so we decided to have the robot give a tour of the lab itself.”
Alistair McBrien is taking advantage of resources available at the lab station. McBrien is a senior studying mechanical engineering.
“This is a tectonics FG504 function generator,” McBrien said. “I picked out of the institute's e-waste bin about a year ago. I'm pretty sure it actually came from here, back there, cleaning out their closets. I fixed it up. There was a dead capacitor in there and a dead op amp [operational amplifier] here, I think the two are probably related. So, I've replaced both of them now. It works pretty well often since it did.”
What does this machine do?
“It basically outputs a varying voltage over time. So, square wave, triangle wave, sine waves, whatever this is.”
What can you use this information for?
“What you can do is do sweep the frequency like so. And this basically means that you've got a right now, I've got a sweeping from 110 kilohertz to 5 kilohertz. So, if I wanted to check to see how something would behave, say a filter or some mechanical device, I could connect it to the output here and then just see what happens. Basically, there's a whole list of various things you can do with it here, like it can do amplitude modulation, it can do so many things. This is probably the greatest analog function generators ever built.”
It’s not only about the tools, though.
“I know it's very low-tech, but they specifically requested for a place to just be. Hence, tables, chairs, places to sit,” Sawyer said. “It's essential for creativity to have a place to be. I know that simple, but I think it really does matter.”
A junior studying computer and systems engineering, Mathew Davis says having access to the lab and its tool at no extra cost is important.
“I like to repair and tinker with my own stuff a lot, and having some of these devices here is amazing,” Davis said. “I previously have looked at getting some of these tools and everything, but it's just the cost has deterred me. So now, being able to be here and just have all this available to me is amazing.”
Davis adds the lab fosters a community among students and staff who wouldn’t typically work together and gives them a chance to add perspective to their studies.
