Like most young girls growing up in the Northeast Bronx in the 1980s, Tahira Reid-Smith spent every school recess jumping Double Dutch. There were about 20 girls clamoring for their turn at the ropes, Reid-Smith says, “and I always felt like I never had enough time to do it.” That’s why, when it was announced that her school was holding a “draw something you wish you could have” poster contest, she didn’t think twice. “Other kids were drawing astronauts and rocket ships—but I was like, ‘Man, it would be so cool to have a machine that could turn Double Dutch just for me.’”

Reid-Smith, now the College of Engineering’s interim associate dean for equity and inclusion and the Arthur C. Glenn professor of engineering education, forgot about her drawing until her sophomore year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. She took a class called Introduction to Engineering Design, in which students were required to apply engineering principles to designing a product. “I happened to be enrolled the semester where the theme was challenging the limits in sports and recreational activities,” she says. “I remember thinking of the obvious sports first—football, basketball. And then the major ‘aha’ moment came, and I remembered my third grade drawing.” 

The ideas flowed so fast, she says, it felt like Reid-Smith didn’t have enough pages in her design notebook. “I now had the ability to sketch in three dimensions, I had just learned statics, I started drawing trusses,” she says of the drawing that ultimately resulted in a working prototype of the automated Double Dutch machine she’d dreamed of in elementary school—a prototype immortalized in a photo at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s “Change Your Game” exhibit. Some grants and seed money allowed Reid-Smith to refine her model and file a patent, and she founded a company, Jump Dreams Inc., to one day bring to market the prototype she continues to refine. 

Competitive Double Dutch, which originated in predominantly Black urban neighborhoods in the 1940s and 1950s, is played by jumping through two jump ropes—or clotheslines and vacuum cleaner cords, Reid-Smith says—turning in eggbeater fashion. Her current prototype is powered by four motors, set up so that the rotations they generate look like a mirror image of each other. It features a large, rechargeable battery, a safety release for the ropes, and weighted support to stabilize the machine when it’s in use. Reid-Smith has tested the prototype in Harlem with the Showdem Movement, which promotes Double Dutch for fitness, and at the 2026 Annual Double Dutch Day organized by Philadelphia-based Philly Girls Jump, where a 36-time Double Dutch champion speed jumper tested her machine. 

“The Double Dutch story is so much older than the prototype itself,” Reid-Smith says. “I’ve had so many fits and starts over the years, but despite everything, it’s the people, the culture, and the community that have kept my idea alive.”