By Liz Dubret
This summer I participated in an Immersion Design Experience (IDE) through the SMU Innovation Gym. I spent ten days and ten nights with seven other SMU students creating a wireless sensor network. We partnered with bcWorkshop, a local non-profit, to help them find a better way to measure living standards within a community. At the end of the experience, our team had eaten six boxes of double stuffed Oreos, soldered for over 24 hours straight, and designed a working prototype collecting noise levels within a community. We even designed and implemented the algorithms to filter the noise and tell which areas of the neighborhood were the loudest and what was causing the noise! It was a great experience and I really enjoyed learning a real-world application to all of my classes.