Project Laboratory
Mechanical engineering juniors and seniors work in groups of two or three on three hands-on projects during the term, each one pairing analytical modeling with experimental testing. The course materials from MIT OpenCourseWare include project assignments, lab guidelines, and grading criteria that emphasize the full research cycle: forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, collecting data, and reconciling results against theory. Written and oral communication is treated as a core skill rather than an afterthought, with reports and presentations required for each project. The subject is built for students who already have engineering fundamentals and need practice applying them to open-ended problems rather than textbook exercises. No lecture videos are included; the value here is in the structured project briefs and lab documentation that show how MIT runs its junior/senior mechanical engineering lab sequence.