Project Thesis Portfolio 7 views

This portfolio addresses the gap between engineering's demonstrated value and students' unequal access to meaningful engineering experiences through two complementary projects. The technical project presents TALOS, a fully autonomous robotic system designed to play Jenga against a human opponent, integrating a Dobot Magician 4-degree-of-freedom robotic arm, an Intel RealSense D405 depth camera, a force-sensitive resistor end-effector, and an IR-controlled motorized turntable. A classical computer vision pipeline and hand-eye calibration routine guide manipulation across a four-state autonomous gameplay loop. Component-level testing across 30 trials achieved 94.84% block detection accuracy and 100% push success, but full-loop performance revealed critical error compounding, with two consecutive successful block placements achieved in only 16.7% of trials, demonstrating that low-cost hardware can perform complex manipulation tasks while remaining highly sensitive to subsystem inaccuracies. The companion STS research paper investigates why engineering education remains marginal in American public high schools despite broad public support for STEM, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital to argue that schools systematically privilege abstract, standardized knowledge over the embodied, project-based learning engineering requires. Through policy analysis and structured literature review, the paper identifies three structural barriers (teacher workforce limitations, the institutional ambiguity of engineering between academic and vocational logics, and accountability systems that favor easily assessable subjects) as the primary forces keeping engineering curricula uneven and inaccessible in under-resourced schools. Together, the projects argue that the engineering education gap is simultaneously a design problem and an institutional one, contributing both a proof-of-concept robotic system and a critical framework for understanding the structural conditions necessary for hands-on engineering education to become equitably available.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

English

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2026-05-09