A robotic hand was throwing down in rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors. A miniature owl soared over Lovett Hall in a music-powered puppet show. Nearby, a vending machine dispensed 3D-printed treats and a marble rolled through a joystick-controlled labyrinth. Everywhere you turned, something moved, danced, blinked or spun.
The atmosphere was electric — literally and figuratively — at the final showcase for Design of Mechatronic Systems, a hands-on engineering course taught by Marcia O’Malley, the Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in Mechanical Engineering. Students in the class, most of them engineering majors, filled the Moody Center for the Arts’ Flex Studio April 30 with tabletop projects they dreamed up, wired, coded and built themselves in teams.
“The final showcase is a chance to see what happens when students take control of their own learning and create something meaningful, delightful and technically impressive,” O’Malley said. “It’s one thing to understand equations on a whiteboard. It’s another thing entirely to make a machine that thinks, senses and responds.”
From a magnet-powered conveyor belt and sound-controlled dancing dolls to automated cooling systems and assistive rehabilitation gloves, each project had its own personality. More importantly, each combined mechanical design, electronic circuitry and computer control, an interdisciplinary blend at the heart of mechatronics.
“This class gives students a unique opportunity to collaborate across engineering disciplines and integrate their knowledge into a real-world system,” O’Malley said. “They don’t just talk about how components work. They make them work together.”
Caleb Combs, a second-year doctoral student in mechanical engineering, said the showcase helped him bridge the gap between theory and practice.
“We’re using Arduino and time of flight sensors to measure the distance between the user’s hand over the system to dictate how fast the motors spin that move the conveyor belt,” Combs said, demonstrating how his team’s conveyor belt works. “The higher your hand is from those sensors, the slower the motors are going to spin and the slower your Rice owl is going to move across the stage.”
Many of the projects also reflected students’ personalities and a sense of fun, like the automated cooling station designed by senior Xinghe Chen and his team.
“It will figure out where it’s hottest, and the control will enable (the fan) to move to the point that is hottest,” said Chen, who is majoring in electrical and computer engineering. “I learned how to actually control a thing. Usually we will type code or we run it on the controllers, but we don’t actually see something in action.”
Another team of seniors decided to make their project a Rice-themed tribute to their four years on campus. Their shadow puppet box features the university’s iconic Lovett Hall and an owl flying overhead, which is brought to life by music.
“It’s been really fun this afternoon getting people to try different songs with it,” said Eleanor Kimbro, a senior bioengineering major.
Kimbro said she had long heard good things about the course’s reputation for giving students the kind of practical, cross-disciplinary experience that’s hard to get elsewhere.
“All semester the class has been so great and really practical,” Kimbro said. “It’s just been fun to do a project where you get to really have fun and be creative with it.”
Bradley Ramsey, a senior in mechanical engineering, said he hoped to take a robotics class before graduating, but when that didn’t fit his schedule, he opted for this course instead.
“Dr. O’Malley is one of the great teachers in the mech area, so I really wanted to take her class and experience the mechatronics role itself, integrating my mechanical engineering side as well as learning more about the electrical engineering and control side,” Ramsey said. “To say that I’ve regarded (electrical engineering) as a magical black box for most of my time as a mechanical engineer might be an understatement.”
His team created a vending machine filled with custom 3D-printed designs, aiming to make something playful and approachable. O’Malley said that sense of creative joy is by design.
“The showcase brings out the best of Rice engineering,” O’Malley said. “It’s about precision and systems thinking, but it’s also about imagination, collaboration and play.”
Whether it was a robotic guitar tuner or a pet-feeding system triggered by sensors, each student-built device at the showcase was a testament to what can happen when different engineering languages are translated into a single, functional idea.
“This class is definitely worth taking,” Ramsey said. “It is challenging, but it’s well worth the time and effort that I put into it.”