ME 250 Individual Reflection - Mark Sprague

Overall, ME 250 has been a positive experience for me. Although it was more work than I expected given what I had heard about the course, I also learned quite a bit more than I expected to. One crucial thing I learned was how to approach the design process. Going through the strategies, concepts, modules and parts that we were required to in order to design our machine helped me understand how to start with a very wide brush on a design and wait to work on the final details. Before this class, I would have started trying to design individual parts before I had figured out what the goal of the entire machine would be. Another thing I learned is that it is important to have everything that a part interacts with engineered before you manufacture it. For example, our most critical module manufacturing was due at the same time as the engineering for the rest of our machine. While we were designing the rest of our machine, we ran into instances where we wished we had done something slightly differently on the arm (which was our most critical module).

I also learned quite a bit about team work. I learned that trying to have four people work on the same thing at once doesn’t work too well. It is much better to split up and work alone or in pairs, then bring the work back to the entire team to evaluate and make necessary changes. It wasn’t necessary to have all four of us show up to the machine shop at a given time for manufacturing either. Only 1 person is necessary to run the machines and a second one can be helpful for fetching tools and such, but with 3 of 4 people present, some people end up not doing anything.

ME 250 also helped me to work on my time management skills. In this class, I wasn’t able to do work whenever I wanted as I have become accustomed to in my other classes. Work needed to be done with my team or in the lab, and that required me working at certain hours and getting a set amount of work done within that time.

One thing I think could be improved upon in the course would be to adjust the time frame of the project. I think it would have been beneficial to have started manufacturing a week earlier than we did, and have an extra week in between the most critical module due date and the date we needed to demonstrate a working machine. There was really only one working week in between those two deadlines, and there was still quite a bit of work to do between the most critical module and the working machine for our team.
Another thing that I think could be improved would be more CAD instruction. I felt that the tutorials went very fast and were very hard to follow. I had to go through them on my own afterwards and I didn’t quite understand it all. I think I would have understood better if the tutorials had gone slower and what was being done was explained clearly. One problem I would have would be missing where the GSI had clicked to get to an option, then spending five minutes looking for it and by the time I found it being very far behind. I think one way this could be improved would be to make narrated videos of the CAD tutorials showing the screen so the student could pause and go back if they missed something. This would be supplemental, not a replacement for the CAD instruction by the GSI.

Also, another thing that could be improved in the course would be to have a more defined problem at the beginning of the class. For example, it would have been very nice if the rules and the specifications were available before we started the brainstorming phase. I think a lot more teams would have used the fixed motor had specifications been released at the beginning of the project.

One way I could have improved my performance in the course would have been to put more time into the initial design phases. I viewed them as not being very important because I hadn’t met up with my team yet, however, I feel if I had put more work into this stage of the class, I could have come up with some better ideas for how to solve the problem.