Steven Christman's Reflection

Overall I thought this class was very good and I learned a great deal in the course. I enjoyed having a hands on project and having the opportunity to design and build a fully functioning machine. In the class I learned a lot about how important the design process is, especially when you have so many components and modules working together.
In the beginning of the class I felt a lot of time was wasted on FRDPARRCS instead of more meaningful topics. It would have been nice to do some things in lab that dealt with the things covered in lecture like gear ratios and linkages. We learned about some things in lecture that we never even touched on during lab. So when we were trying to come up with a design in the beginning we shied away from more complex designs because we didn’t understand some concepts fully. It would have been much better to assign the teams sooner in the semester so we could have more time to work on the machine design. It would have been nice to have the kit as soon as we get into our teams to see exactly what materials we had to work with. The homework assignments in the beginning didn’t seem to help with the project very much. It would have been nice to have assignments geared more toward the kind of stuff we would need to know for the project. When registering for this class it said this class did not require physics, but the homework seemed to deal with quite a bit of physics. The physics required wasn’t very hard, but it was still beyond what we were learning at physics at the time. It would have been nice to have more recitations so more could attend because I was always busy during that time.
Having to manufacture everything was a great learning experience. It was good to learn that just because you can design something, doesn’t mean you can actually manufacture it. It also gave me a good understanding at how precise manufacturing can actually be. This class has given me much more respect for how difficult manufacturing can be. I think it would have been nice if we could have had some lab time in the machine shop before we actually started on the project besides just the training sessions. Then we could have had a lab assignment on the manufacturing process so that we would have a little more experience before starting the project.
It was very helpful to have the CAD lab and assignments. I feel much better knowing Solidworks because I know that will be integral part of being a mechanical engineer. It would have been nice to learn some more complex processes in Solidworks. Also being able to get the Solidworks on our personal computers was extremely beneficial so we wouldn’t have to spend countless hours in the library doing CAD.
I could have improved my performance in this class by going to office hours for the homework assignments instead of just struggling to do it on my own. I know I could have planned my time better and not waited until right before the due date to do the assignments.