Individual Reflection - Brent Cragin

Design

The class has taught me about the basic steps of the design process and how to go about them properly.  Starting at a high level and working your way down makes sure you cover all the design requirements of what you are trying to make.   The design process started early on in the semester, coming up with strategies on how we would like to play the slotbots game.  This was done individually along with a couple of the other processing involved in designing leading to multiple choices when we finally did get into our final groups for the project.  When we started talking about the end of the design process we began learning how to present our designs in an easily understandable and detailed way for manufacturing purposes.

Manufacturing

The course taught many of the proper ways of general manufacturing for the scope of the class and even covered some entities not needed for the completion of our slotbots.   These manufacturing concepts taught were very helpful with understanding how to go about actually making parts.  One of the things that I found surprising was that after learning the proper way to manufacture a part I would have to go back to my design and change things due to them not being manufacturing friendly.  I will say I probably enjoyed this part of the class the most.  Getting to machine parts and then putting them together in a way that completes a design that you made is pretty cool.

Teamwork

Teamwork was emphasized heavily in this course and was required for the completion of a working bot.  This is the norm throughout most of the classes I have taken in the College of Engineering here at UofM.  The reasoning behind this is quite simple; we will be working as part of a team for the majority of our professional lives.

How to improve the course

·         Game rules kept changing even after designs were picked and manufacturing began

·         Discrepancies between what the GSIs were telling students

·         Lectures seemed to be very repetitive at times, two lectures in a row would sometimes cover a lot of the same information

·         Lectures didn’t have enough “important” information to cover the entire class time and a lot of extra slides were included to cushion this

·         Lab times were rushed in contrast to the lectures and didn’t have enough time to go over everything planned for the day

·         Have teams decided earlier in the semester and have at least one small project the team has to work on in order to see how they work together.  If things don’t go so well they can change.

·         Coordination with other classes on when projects are due.  We kept running into issues with getting machines to use up until the final week when we were the only class using the machine shop, this was when our entire bot was built.

How I could have improved my performance

I feel I could have improved my performance if I would have managed my time better.  A lot of times I would find out something was due in a day or two and would try to fit it in to everything else going on in other classes.  This would also have helped when doing assignments that built off of other assignments since doing them together would have made more sense at times.