Everyone does dumb designs while starting to learn things... Isn't it a sign of professional growth to look back and realize that your designs for some circuits were dumb?

The article never says the thing was designed my an MIT student, does it? I am a half-baked electrical engineering undergrad here and even I can see the flaws in this design. And supposedly, all the code is in C. Any self respecting MIT student would use assembly for this. I highly doubt it was designed by an MIT graduate. Also, I agree there is nothing substantial in this - this is like thirty minutes worth of work. Any fool can hookup an ADC to a micro. No one here at MIT thinks this is smart or anything. However, we let these things happen here because if we want sponsors for any of the real things we do, we have to give them something in return and most of the times what they want is advertisement of this form. Stop looking at this as something representing MIT. It was just displayed by a kit manufacturing company at a tech school at an event designed for prospective freshmen ( = high school students), clearly a great marketing opportunity for this kind of a thing.