Peter Haas, the Executive Director of the AIDG, is to appear on WGBH's Design Squad, a new  reality competition for teens. The show's goal is to help kids develop a lifelong interest in math, science, and engineering by showing them the weird and wonderful things engineering can accomplish.

Over 13 episodes, eight teenagers compete to design and build fantastic, whimsical, and fully operational machines for real clients. Teams, and team members, are scored for their ability to think outside the box and meet (or surpass) the demands of the challenge at hand. In the final episode, the top two scorers battle for the Grand Prize—a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel®Foundation to study science, engineering, math, or technology.

  The episode with Haas involves the creation of a simple peanut butter maker for MIT professor Amy Smith and Haitian community activist Gerthy Lahens.  Peter will help judge the competition as well as build a more durable version of the winning design. The end product will be presented to a women's peanut butter cooperative in Petite-Anse, Haiti. This episode is particularly special because it is the only one in the series that illustrates how engineering can have a wider global impact and be used to address important social issues.

   Design Squad was filmed in and around Cambridge, MA (with some footage taken in Haiti) in summer 2006 and will premiere on PBS in February 2007.