‘Trial and Error’: SEAS Design Fair Invites Students to Present Capstone Projects

Students from 15 undergraduate courses and organizations flocked to Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex on Thursday for the annual School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Design and Project Fair.

The fair gave participating students the chance to showcase projects created over the course of the academic year — drawing class final projects, senior theses, and designs from a number of undergraduate clubs and makerspaces.

For some courses, presenting at the fair was integrated into final grade requirements. One of the courses — ES 50: “Introduction to Electrical Engineering” — brought students from across class years to highlight their projects.

One team of students in the class built and programmed animatronic heads modeled after their own, designed to replicate human emotions by blinking, speaking, or making facial expressions when instructed through an app — a project they said was focused on “combining the digital and the physical world.”

“Nowadays, you see so many things with AI and trying to replicate human abilities, but you don’t see as much in the physical sense,” Hayley Bloch ’27 said. “Replicating human emotions with just a 3D printed head with some hobby servos is the coolest thing you could do.”

Many of the projects were created through class labs focused on engineering and physics, where students were largely independent but could turn to course staff with questions when needed. But navigating the challenges of developing their projects was core to the experience, the students said.

“I feel like that is kind of the core concept of mechanical engineering — failing first,” Bloch said. “A lot of it is trial and error. It’s closer to an art than a science.”

Presenting at the fair also challenged students to take a semester or year’s worth of work and translate it for a general audience.

“The hope was that the project would be fun and interactive to show that engineering projects can be fun and they don’t have to be super complex and hard to understand,” Andrea A. González Trujillo ’27 said.

Inspired by Mexican piñatas, she and her team created an electrical piñata that had memory built into it. If someone could repeat the pattern that the piñata showed by hitting it, the piñata would open a door and display candy on the screen.

“People really get to showcase what it is that they like about engineering plus their other interests,” said Gónzalez Trujillo.

Some projects also allowed students to draw from personal experiences. Jinwon Ha ’29, another student in ES 50, and his group drew inspiration for their project — a walkie-talkie system that transmits digital signals — from being international students.

“The three of us are international students, and being able to call home, call family and relatives, was a really nice thing,” Ha said. “I think that really inspired us to work on communication ourselves.”

During the fair, seven seniors enrolled in ES 100: “Engineering Design Projects” were also given the Dean’s Awards for Outstanding Engineering Projects, which was awarded to three individuals and two team projects. The winning projects varied in structure and purpose — from robotic platforms designed for harsh marine environments to engineered cartilage tissue developed to treat knee osteoarthritis.

One of the winning teams — Mikaya C. Parente ’26 and Kuma L. S. McCraw ’26 — designed and built a modular fixed-wing vertical and takeoff landing drone platform for sperm whale tracking and localization.

“There’s constant iteration, especially on the computer-aided design side of things, because you make a component and you realize it’s failing in some way,” McCraw said. “It’s easy to switch out individual components, but it was a lot of times when we had to go back to the drawing board and redesign parts.”

But after winning the award, Parente and McCraw said it felt like much of their work had paid off.

“All the days where we were like, ‘You know what, why are we even doing this? What are we doing?’— it feels pretty good, I’d say,” Parente said.

“I think it could always be better,” McCraw said, “but obviously I don’t regret the project because I was able to learn so much.”