As a non-engineering student, I took this course solely because I was interested in becoming more familiar with the overall process of design and manufacturing; in this regards, the class has been a great success for me. I appreciate the confluence of theory and application that the course provides, and being able to end the semester with a functioning remote-controlled machine is a very gratifying, and cool, experience!
Design and Manufacturing:
I very much enjoyed the two aspects of ME250: design and manufacturing. I noticed that though these two processes are distinct from one another, they are also very much interwoven and interdependent. The instructors, I believe, did a good job of providing this understanding by the way that the lectures/labs were organized.
I learned the difference between effective and ineffective approaches to design, and I value the lesson of approaching design very broadly at first, then narrowing in on the specifics (strategy -> concept -> module -> parts...).
In addition to this approach to design, I also learned the importance of keeping the manufacturing aspect in mind when designing a machine. Our team did have to make some adjustments to our model because we did not at first take into full account the limitations of our kit materials, etc. In a future project, I would be more mindful of the interconnection of the two processes of design and manufacturing.
My favorite part of the course, and a major reason I had for taking the course in the first place, was becoming familiar with modeling things on Solidworks. The software is a very powerful tool, and being able to design an entire machine and create drawings of the parts with Solidworks was definitely one of the coolest things about this course in my mind.
Regarding manufacturing, I learned a great deal. I had never been trained in a machine shop before, so using the lathe, mill, drill press, laser cutter, band saw, etc., were all mostly new concepts to me. I used the mill more than any other tool in the machine shop, and so I think I now have a fairly comfortable grasp on how to use a mill in the future for manufacturing parts. In addition to these tools, I now have a deep appreciation for precision measuring tools and good practices of precision measurement-taking. The idea of tolerances is still not too clear in my mind (i.e. choosing a tolerance considering the application of the part..), but taking precise measurements is something that I both enjoyed and found important for our manufacturing and (especially) assembly phases of the project.
Teamwork and Time Management:
At a school such as ours, I find that I'm surrounded by many smart and driven individuals, and this was certainly the case in our group. Without effective teamwork, such a project as the one in ME250 would be impossible to complete in a single semester. I learned that when working in a team, it is important to voice one's ideas and sometimes even do so strongly and with dedication, but I also learned that it is highly counterproductive to become attached to your own ideas. In our group, I don't think we had the problem of people taking a rejection of their ideas personally. I think that we could have all expressed more differing ideas, which would have led to more innovation and creative/better design, but given that it was our first time doing such a project, our discussions and planning sessions were very interesting and fruitful.
Time management was the biggest issue, and we quickly realized that we couldn't all meet as a complete group every time. Especially when it came to manufacturing our parts, I think that the ratio of number of available tools in the shop to the number of students wanting to use those tools was extremely low, and this caused much unnecessary (though maybe unavoidable, since they are **expensive tools) delay in our scheduled plans.
Improvements:
I think that the course can be improved by increasing the speed with which the class hits the ground running at the beginning of the semester, and getting students into the shop earlier. Lectures were fairly interesting, though sometimes it was difficult to pay attention; I think that the videos and media play a huge role in sparking interest, and more integration of multimedia elements in lecture would improve the course greatly. I think also that the Mill/Lathe exercises were a waste of time. None of the people in our team got much out of those exercises, and we forgot everything by the time we actually started manufacturing.
I think that the final was very difficult, and the theory not emphasized enough in the lecture materials. I attended the big review session for the exam, and the GSI made it sound like it would be a fairly simple and straightforward exam (NOT the case), so I think it's important that the instructors provide some more guidance to the GSIs as far as the information that they are conveying to the students.
I could have improved my performance in the course by attending more office hours to clarify parts of the course that I didn't understand. I started to communicate more with Emily about questions/ideas I had towards the end of the semester, but I think I would have benefited more by doing that more consistently throughout the entire semester.
Amir
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