iFoundry trip sends students to rural Missouri for innovative non-profit

Earlier this semester, Kevin Wolz came into the iFoundry office with an idea. The junior in civil engineering and environmental engineering wanted to organize a six-hour trip to what he described as “the middle of nowhere Missouri” to visit a farm.

“I’ve never, ever walked into the iFoundry office and left disappointed,” Wolz said. “Anytime I go in there with an idea, the answer has always been ‘Go ahead’ or ‘Let’s do it.’ There’s always a positive attitude and an encouraging answer.”

Wolz wanted to get a team of students to visit Cameron, Mo., which is home to Open Source Ecology (OSE) and the Factor e Farm. OSE is a network of farmers and engineers who have been working on the Global Village Construction Set, an open-source, affordable technological platform that teaches people how to make what OSE considers to be the most essential machines for a sustainable farming community.

The Global Village Construction Set is being operated out of the Factor e Farm, which is OSE’s main headquarters. OSE builds the designs and prototypes of machines such as tractors, bulldozers and cement mizers, and publishes detailed designs, instructions, videos and demos as open-source material on the web.

“The goal is for third-world villages or small-scale farmers in the US to be able to build what they need or customize to their needs,” Wolz said. “Not everyone will be able to afford giant John Deere tractors.”

The idea of the trip came after Wolz watched informational videos about OSE and discovered the opportunity for a visit on its website.

“It was a very iFoundry-esque type of trip as far as it being very innovative and hands on, as opposed to lectures and problem sets,” Wolz said.

iFoundry helped Wolz organize a group of eight students, who made the trip out to Factor e Farm on Nov. 5. There, the students received a tour of OSE’s operations, as well as being able to participate with the production of the project.

“I can talk all day in my structural engineering class about how to build a column, but in the first fifteen minutes of our visit, we had analyzed the designs of the columns and then we were busy building,” Wolz said. “Even people who weren’t civil engineers were doing this. You couldn’t have asked for a more hands-on experience.”

Like many engineering students, Wolz has been actively involved with iFoundry during his time on campus, and his experience has helped connect him with other students on a social level.

“Possibly the best part of the trip was the conversations on the way there and back,” Wolz said. “A big part of all of this is getting connected with and getting to know people with these same interests and passions as you.”

Since the summer of 2007, iFoundry has been a cross-disciplinary curriculum incubator in the College of Engineering that has been dedicated to transforming engineer education as it also develops student aspirations.

“They have this structure where the students can develop the ideas to begin with, and as soon as they do, they encourage it and ask “What can we do to help it?” Wolz said.
_____________________

Writer: Jay Lee, Engineering Communications Office.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.