Reflection - Amanda

What did I learn in ME 250? Here it is, broken down by category.

DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING:

Basically everything I learned, I learned in this class. Before ME 250 I made pretty much made nothing, not counting 6^th grade shop class and a silly Engin 100 project. I guess I knew some of the design process, as made sense when we went over it in lecture, but the lectures gave names to steps in the process that before were fuzzy. I found all the info on mechanical components to be fairly interesting, as I didn’t know much about them before. It was nice to get a feel for each component in our kit before actually working with them and know what each component can do. I learned a lot about using the machines in the shop, too, as I had never really used them before.

TEAMWORK:

This class reinforced the things I have already learned about teamwork. If everyone is pulling their weight and getting along, things go very smoothly. If someone doesn’t, it increases everyone’s workload and annoyance exponentially. Also, things often take longer to accomplish when everyone tries to work together on everything. It’s often more efficient for group members to work independently and then come together for discussion. Playing to team members’ strengths is important, too. For example, a few of my team members had a lot of experience from robotics in high school, which made them the best people to start off our manufacturing and teach the rest of us how to do it. That being said, even if a team member doesn’t have experience, there were still valuable ways for them to contribute.

TIME MANAGEMENT:

My time management was decent in this class. One my teams’ reasons for designing our machine the way we did was so that we could finish manufacturing early and have plenty of time to test it. This didn’t really happen. Although the manufacturing wasn’t too complicated, we were still manufacturing things up until the week of the competition. This was partly due to adjustments that had to be made, but I think if we had started manufacturing earlier we could have made even more adjustments and figured out ways to make our machine better. For assignments that we had to turn in, we were often working on them the night before. Although this is not particularly outstanding time management, we still accomplished the things we needed too without too much last minute stress.

HOW THE COURSE CAN BE IMPROVED:

Just as the students could have managed their time better, I believe the instructors could have managed their time better by getting information out earlier. It would have been nice to have a complete version of the rules that wasn’t going to change at all at the very beginning of the class. I understand that this was a completely new way of doing the class, and I appreciate all the work that went into planning the competition, but I think it would have made things easier on us if we were better informed, earlier. Also, I think the kits could have been improved with less variety of materials, but more quantity.

IMPROVING MY PERFORMANCE:

I think I could have improved my performance by going to office hours for the lecture homework assignments. Those killed me a little bit. Also, as previously mentioned, time management could have been a better when working towards the milestones.