2.007

In 2.007, the first Design and Manufacturing course in MIT's undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum, students were tasked to design and build a robot that could successfully complete one or more of many tasks on a specially-designed game board. In the year I took the class, the theme of the class was "Operation", and some of the medically-inspired tasks included filling a balloon in the right position ("angioplasty"), collecting 3D-printed parts from the game board ("rib surgery") and pulling a wrench from a cavity ("ankle surgery").