Engineering Design and Rapid Prototyping
MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics offers this hands-on design course built around a two-phase team project. In phase one, student teams conceive, design, and build a structural component using rapid prototyping methods and computer-aided tools, working through iteration, fabrication, and validation to meet a defined set of requirements and constraints. In phase two, teams return to their phase one prototype as a baseline and run design optimization using structural analysis software, comparing the optimized result against the original manually designed component. The course materials, published through MIT OpenCourseWare, include assignments and project documentation covering the full design cycle from concept to fabrication to computational optimization. It suits students who want practical experience with prototyping tools and structural analysis software rather than pure lecture-based theory, and it is free to access with no certificate offered.