Subject 3.082 has existed in its present form for approximately ten years, when it replaced four separate laboratories specializing in DMSE's then restricted elective areas (ceramics, electronic materials, metals, and polymers). At that time, the Department voted to affirm the conclusions of a committee, that our curricular needs would be better served by a single laboratory centered on materials processing and design that dealt with all materials types.

As its name implies, the 3.082 Materials Processing Laboratory involves working with such operations as investment casting of metals, injection molding of polymers, and sintering of ceramics. After all the abstraction and theory in the lecture part of the DMSE curriculum, many students have found this hands-on experience with materials to be very fun stuff-several have said that 3.082 was their favorite DMSE subject. The lab is more than operating processing equipment, however. It is intended also to emulate professional practice in materials engineering project management, with aspects of design, analysis, teamwork, literature and patent searching, web creation and oral presentation, and more.

After an initial syllabus discussion and laboratory tours, the student teams will begin discussing the possibilities for projects, based on the guidelines outlined below. The team's initial thoughts on a project should be mailed by one member, so that the computer team lockers can be made. Each team will outline their initial plans at the 1pm presentation a week before the first session-transparencies or PowerPoint OK, but chalk and blackboard fine also.

The first two weeks of the term will be spent firming up the project goals with the instructors, and carrying out some "canned" laboratory exercises aimed at developing a set of tools needed in the later project work. One member of each team will be delegated to one of four subgroups:

• Mechanical testing, specimen preparation, heat treatment, optical microscopy
• SolidWorks CAD, Finite Element Analysis (ANSYS), 3-D printing, perhaps injection molding
• Investment casting
• Unknown-to be determined

Of course, not all of these will be needed in all projects, but it is intended to have a broad range of expertise in each group on which the team can draw.

By Day 1, the teams will have solidified their plans and performed a literature/patent search and study along with some preliminary calculations, and a team member will present a formal project proposal during the Day 1 presentation period at 1pm. This presentation will be allotted 10 minutes and be limited to three required PowerPoint visuals:

• A title slide, giving the team's name, members, and project goal
• A schematic (SolidWorks preferred but a scanned hand sketch OK for now) of the project's proposed device
• A Gantt chart of the project's time sequencing (Microsoft Project)

It's not always possible for a single project to have all the features desired in 3.082, but in developing a project proposal teams should strive to include the following:

The project has to live within constraints of available time and resources. Teams can seek resources from anywhere within or outside the Institute, not being limited to the laboratory facilities and staff assigned explicitly to 3.082. DMSE will reimburse costs for materials, copying, machining, etc. within reason. The time constraints are fixed, however, and very demanding. We strongly advise that the teams begin experimental work as soon as the project has been defined. These projects usually involve processes which sound straightforward on paper, but turn out to be surprisingly hard to implement in practice. So get some practice early on: it will pay off later.

Given the very limited time available, the project must be relatively simple-avoid difficult-to-process materials, research-level processing methods, very small feature sizes, etc.

The project will ideally treat or at least consider a wide variety of materials: metals, ceramics, and polymers.

The project must have a principal processing method-injection molding, investment casting, sintering, etc. that will be exercised (and analyzed) in depth. Auxiliary processing methods are very desirable.

Project should ideally employ a wide variety of analytical methods and concepts in MSE-all four corners of the processing-structure-property-performance tetrahedron should be present, and treated at a high professional level.

All teams will typically employ CAD, FEA and data acquisition/reduction software in designing and analyzing their devices.

The project should build on the existing patent and journal literature in MSE.

Many past 3.082 projects have emulated a startup venture, with market and cost analyses being a natural part of the reporting. This approach works well, but projects with more of a research orientation would also be acceptable.

Regular laboratory hours are during the twice-weekly three hour sessions, with presentations during the weekly twenty minute session. Students are free to perform laboratory work whenever they wish, although safety rules prohibit doing laboratory work while alone.

3.082 is one of DMSE's two "communication-intensive" subjects (3.081 is the other), and student communication will be a substantial portion of the grade. Each team will develop a web site containing the project's goals, background, results, conclusions, etc.; this site takes the place of the usual written report. Each team member will be individually responsible for one of the major web pages (background, design, materials, processing). At the time of the final presentation on Day 5, the team will also have prepared a hallway display of their project, similar to those of earlier 3.082 teams which are to be found near DMSE headquarters.

The web site will also contain a link to the team's "electronic laboratory notebook," which will be kept current as the term progresses. The notebook will contain a concise but thorough description of each day's results and plans, along with data analyses and scanned-in pictures and graphs of important results. The notebook will also contain safety-related issues, such as MSDS's for each material used and safety protocols for each experimental procedure carried out by the team. (All 3.082 students must have passed the DMSE Safety Quiz).

Once every week, a single student-a different one each time-from two of the team wills present a 20-minute progress report. The presentation will use computer projection of PowerPoint files placed in the team locker. The other two teams will present the following week. All team presentations, including questions, will be finished by 2 pm so laboratory work may begin. Students will be graded individually for each presentation, although most 3.082 work will be graded on a team basis.

Oral presentation is one of the most important factors influencing career advancement, perhaps even more than technical writing. You'll want to consider the following points:

Avoid slides with bulleted text lists if possible; they tend to be boring and ineffective.Use drawings or photos instead, and use them as a focus for your spoken words.

Use a stick or laser pointer, never your finger (or even worse, the shadow of your finger). The pointer and other paraphernalia are your responsibility; don't assume the instructors or others will provide them. Don't wave the pointer around, but be crisp and definitive in pointing to objects on the screen. Make sure all in the audience can see the screen, and don't block it with your body or your shadow.

Don't bring too many visuals: two minutes per slide is about right, but of course it depends on the content. The amount of time permitted in a presentation is limited and usually much shorter than you'd like, and it's easy to ruin a presentation by running out of time. Rehearsing is a very good idea.

Don't make pseudo-drawings out of colored rectangles and other low-level graphics; use CAD software or a scanned-in drawing.

Work at keeping the technical level appropriate to the audience-in 3.082 you're speaking to persons with a lot of education in materials, though probably not in the specific subarea of your talk. You want to bring your audience up to a professional level of understanding about your project and its underlying science.

On demeanor: Be relaxed and engaging, but not flippant or juvenile.Speak clearly and slowly. Be dramatic, though not too much so. A little humor is fine, but stay on-message. Don't showboat or project a know-it-all arrogance. Smile; make a lot of eye contact. Try to fill your audience with excitement about your work.

Staying on schedule is probably the most difficult aspect of 3.082, and as the end of the term approached almost all past teams have wished they'd worked faster and more efficiently at the first of the term. Teams have to delegate tasks to individual members and brainstorm continually about who's to do what next. Some dates to keep in mind, and to incorporate into your Gantt charts:

Day 1: Presentation of project proposals.

Day 2: Final design review.

NOTE: In this design review we want to see lots of calculations supporting the design decisions you have made, and justifying your choice of materials. We want to see that you are evaluating the conditions of service and the operating environment, and estimating the expected ranges of forces and stresses, heat and mass transfer and energy density as appropriate, and also providing an analysis of the characteristics and failure modes of existing competitor products.

Day 3: Presentation of prototypes.

Day 4: Dry run of final presentation, last day for laboratory work.

Day 5: Final presentation, hallway display complete.