Reflection - Tim

Design and Manufacturing
I did not learn anything new about design or manufacturing, but I'm sure other people did. I was a part of the FIRST Robotics Team in high school for four years; the entire ME250 course was essentially a scaled down version of my previous experiences. I appreciate the massive effort that went into teaching basic design and manufacturing in the course. However, I noticed some gaps in the lessons that negatively effected students new to the process. This will be explained further in the "Course Improvement" section.

Teamwork
As opposed to Design and Manufacturing, I learned more about teamwork. Everyone on my team did their jobs spectacularly, that was not a problem. The problem arose when everyone was trying to work on the same design or machine piece at the same time. Everyone wants to help, but too many ideas or hands working on the same design or machine piece will smother it. Effective division of labor is an important lesson I won't forget. This problem never arose in my Robotics Team because people were often more concerned with eating the free food than working on the robot.

Time Management
I have a problem with time management. I hate being late, but I often get sidetracked easily and lose track of time. The milestones of the project have helped tremendously in my opinion. If there had been no milestones, things would've turned out differently for me. From this course, I learned that setting milestones will help more than simply setting a goal in the distance.

Course Improvement
The most important thing that needs to be improved is preparation of materials. We must have clear rules and objectives at the beginning of the course. This first course was fine though, seeing how it was a major change from before. The second thing I would do is create teams and start manufacturing a bit earlier. More time is always nice. It seemed like more material than necessary was presented for the first half of the course.

There needs to be more focus on teaching manufacturing. Design was taught well, but I saw many manufacturing mistakes during the course. For example, people did not know what parts needed accurate machining and what parts didn't. A drill press should not be used on pillow blocks for aligning a shaft, a mill should be used instead (one team had problems with the shaft grinding into a bearing). A band saw cannot be depended on for close accurate cuts, it should be roughly cut followed with milling. Another example, people did not know what fasteners to use for certain situations. Epoxy is easily broken in certain loading configurations (this was why one team lost). Putting screws (or even staples?) through wood isn't particularly effective. These are just small little lessons, but they can improve manufacturing quality a lot. This is important or students will create hard-to-manufacture designs that are ultimately inefficient.

Personal Improvement
The most important thing that could have been improved was time management. We rushed things at the end and created a working but un-optimized machine. If we had even three extra days, we could have eliminated the major problem bugging our machine.