Engineering Relief for Haiti

In January of 2010, Haiti suffered a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that killed 220,000 people, injured 300,000, and left over 1.5 million homeless. Recognized as the poorest country in the western hemisphere, the country has limited resources to rebuild the cities and villages damaged by the natural disaster. Since the earthquake, thousands of Haitians have continued to live in unsafe housing. A team of eight undergraduate students from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) Summer 2014 Grand Challenge Program team developed a project that addressed this housing crisis: plastic "lumber." The Grand Challenge course is a teamtaught multidisciplinary design, build, and document class, with professors from the Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Optics, and Humanities and Social Sciences departments. While the three professors presented the students with the task of developing and designing a project for Haiti disaster relief, the concepts, solutions, ideas, and designs originated with the student team in just nine weeks.