Repeatability in engineering product design ensures that a manufacturing process performs the same way every time and allows for a working prototype to be transformed into a reliable, safe, consistent, and cost-effective mass-market product. For students in class 2.70 (Fundamentals of Precision Product Design), precision and repeatability are the name of the game. '[As an engineer], you have an extra responsibility to overlook nothing,' says course instructor Alex Slocum, the Walter M. and A. Hazel May Professor of Mechanical Engineering. 'If you miss something, someone could be hurt or die.' Slocum's message is serious, but his approach to teaching the material is famously fun ' in fact, he prefers the spelling 'FUNdaMENTALs' for the first word of the class name. His mother, Mariana Polonsky Slocum, was a mathematics student at MIT. 'She taught me, physics doesn't care about your feelings,' he says. 'I want [students] to understand that we are governed by the laws of physics, and...
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