Engineering Design Workshop

Six devices to help handicapped people maneuver wheelchairs independently were designed by 25 engineering students in an eight-week summer design course at Thayer School. The students worked directly with crippled children and therapists at the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, N. H.

The wheelchair devices - for climbing curbs, stairs, and transferring patients - were demonstrated before a panel of evaluators composed of doctors, engineers, businessmen, and government workers as the climax to the Engineering 21 summer session. The course was taught by seven visiting professors who participated in a National Science Foundation-sponsored Design Education Workshop guided by the Thayer School faculty.

The visiting professors' aim was to study and assess the course by teaching it, and possibly to incorporate some of the Thayer School techniques into the curriculum at their own universities. The faculty also carried out their own design project, a system for weighing hospital patients in bed, with the assistance of the staff at Hanover's Mary Hitchcock Hospital.