A break to explore
Most folks don’t spend much time contemplating the computer mouse. It’s just another piece of technology that takes up desk space, and what little attention it gets usually comes when it breaks. A handful of Harvard graduate students, postdocs, and staffers, however, now have a new respect for the engineering behind the lowly mouse, because they built one from scratch. As part of the fifth annual January@GSAS, a series of more than 100 classes, seminars, and training sessions offered to students in Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences during semester break, a workshop introduced participants to the many uses of Arduino microcontrollers, through a project in which they built and programmed working computer mice. “It was a pleasant surprise to find workshops like this being held,” said Alp Sipahigil, a fourth-year graduate student in physics, who attended the session. “I knew about Arduino devices, and had been looking for a chance to...