Final Projects at Olin
Fall 2022
Highlights from the fall semester's final projects!
Projects, Projects Projects! - Experience Olin College Finals Fall 2022
Members of the Fall 2022 Principles of Integrated Engineering (PIE) class: (L to R): Luke '25, Ellie '25, Gabe '25, Alexis '25, and Olga '25, pose with their final project, "OALEG."
At the end of each semester at Olin, classrooms, labs, shops, the Library and even Milas Hall Mezzanine are filled with students working on finishing and presenting a myriad of amazing final projects. Projects that run the gamut from mechatronic systems to product assemblies built from injection molded parts to research on technical and policy implications of different communications systems coexisting to cyclic codes and their shift-register implementations to CPU design, bio-inspired games, graphics displays, digital audio, and much more!
Check out highlights below to glimpse the inventive, collaborative + impactful work taking place at Olin.
Principles of Integrated Engineering (PIE)
In PIE, second-year students conceive, design, and implement a mechatronic system that includes mechanical design, electronics, and software – keeping in mind real-world constraints of materials, process and budget.
Project: Dancing Degas
Antony '25, Lilly '25, Jiayuan '25, Stephanie '25 and Malvina '25 pose with their project, "Dancing Degas."
"Dancing Degas is a music visualizer that was designed to take in a user’s song request and draw a visual representation of it as a colorful spirograph drawing. It combines software for analyzing music and controlling the motors with a gantry that executes the drawing, thus employing programming, electrical and mechanical skills from the entire team." - Malvina '25
Project: HOVERBOIS
Ethan '25, William '25, and Devlin '25 (all in foreground) with their PIE final project, "HOVERBOIS."
"Our goal was to build a semi-autonomous, amphibious hovercraft around the theme that it could be used for search and rescue missions. We ultimately ended up building the Waterstrider, a remote controlled hovercraft capable of both terrestrial and aquatic travel.” - Ethan '25
Project: Bar Bot
Olin Professor Amon Millner, associate professor of computing and innovation, and Albert '25 pose with the project, "Bar Bot."
"BarBot is designed to take a user's order through our user interface and then accurately dispense the ingredients into the user's glass using peristaltic pumps.” - Albert ‘25
Quantitative Engineering Analysis (QEA)
QEA is a second and third semester course that provides an integrated and project-based approach to teaching concepts in math, science, and engineering. In the first semester of the course (QEA I) topics include statistics and multi-variable calculus taught in the context of a boat design project, linear algebra in the context of facial recognition software, and mechanics and controls in the context of mobile robots.
The goal of the QEA1 final projects is to create a poster about concepts learned during the semester or about further applications of the concepts. Both projects utilize Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique to perform image recognition.
Project: How Similar are Matt and Will?
Maya '26 and Will '26 talk with Professor John Geddes and others about their project, "How Similar are Matt and Will?"
Matt and Will are often mistaken for one another, so Maya and Will have performed PCA to prove that Matt and Will are in fact quite similar.
Project: EigenAnime: Using PCA to Match Human Faces with Anime Characters.
Dokyun '26, Ellen '26, and Maurice '26 share their project with students in the Norden Auditorium.
Instead of using facial recognition on solely human faces, the team has combined it with anime characters to see if it was possible to match between human faces and anime characters. Though the human-to-anime match accuracy was low, the anime-to-anime match accuracy was 70%, which was surprisingly high.
Discrete Math (+ Connections with Music, ECE, Politics, Robotics, Art, ME, and more!)
Discrete Mathematics is a course that will introduce students to advanced counting and partitioning techniques as well as widely applicable discrete structures such as graphs and trees.
Project: The Traveling Salesman
The Traveling Salesman project team of Ben ‘24, Jess ‘25, Daniel ‘24 and Han ‘24 pose before the start of their presentation with some scrumptious muffins supplied by Olin Dining.
The team pretended they were a hiring firm looking to hire a Traveling Salesman algorithm for a certain job description. They gave each algorithm a personality and presented a technical and humorous SWOT analysis for each contender.
Project: Mazes - Algorithms to Generate and Solve Mazes
Raul ‘24, Keanu ‘24 and Claire’s ‘24 present their Discrete Math final presentation: Mazes - Algorithms to generate and solve mazes.
The team talked about maze generation, detailing how they’re represented in the project as graphs and trees and then they compared three different algorithms for generating mazes. The trio also looked at a general algorithmic technique called Backtracking to optimally solve the puzzles, using a brute force approach.
Design Nature
In their first year, all Olin students take Design Nature (DesNat) - an introduction to mechanical design and prototyping. In the class, students design and engineer a toy that captures the wonder of nature in a fun way – with an audience of real fourth graders from a local school as their audience.
Project: From Angler Fish to Zebras
Last but not least, on Monday, December 19, Olin’s first-year students shared bio-inspired games they created as part of this semester’s Design Nature course. Students have been hard at work crafting engaging and memorable animal game experiences for students in Grades 3-5. Now that the Olin community has had a turn, the games will be delivered to this year’s partner school in Cambridge.
View more photos of this year's Design Nature creations.