Final Reflection

For me this class was not as useful as it may have been to most other members of the class. I am on the Formula SAE team here at the Michigan, and have been designing and building parts/machines for 2 years. Almost everything that we are required to have learned by the end of this class, I have already learned and had experience with, from CAD to manufacturing. I did learn a descent amount about teamwork and time management. We had one of the more complex machines to put together, which required a lot of time to machine and even more time to assemble. Our team ended up pushing a lot of the work off towards the end of the semester where a number of issues were discovered in our design. This caused us to spend literally day and night finishing up the manufacturing of our machine to be ready for both the deadlines and the competition. On the teamwork side, I learned that a lot more time than I previously thought needs to be put into planning and carefully laying out what each person needs to do and when they need to have it done. I understand that this course was recently redesigned and this semester was in part a test, but there are a number of things that need to be improved if this course is going to stay the way it was this semester. The rules for the competition, and the construction of the arena (or similar) must be completed prior to the start of class or during the first couple of weeks. I felt that a lot of time was wasted during the design portion of the class designing possible machines that were completely irrelevant to the final arena design and final rules of the competition. Since this is a design class, I believe that there should be more requirements on proving your design (using math) to the staff, and the student should be graded more heavily on this. Otherwise the class will become one where a student can throw together a machine with no thought behind it and perform decently in the. I did think that the idea of having a competition at the end of the class was a good idea, but it would have helped if the competition was a part of our grade (even if it was a small part). This gives more of an incentive to put some work into the class. Earlier on in the class I also felt that some of the written homework assignments were busy work instead of being helpful or applicable to the class. Questions such as coming up with a story describing a picture seems unimportant to me (hmwk 1). If the goal is to improve creativity I would suggest creating assignments that are aimed at expanding a students creativity rather than just seeing if they can be creative or not. Another issue I saw in the class was the midterm exam. I felt that this exam was much to long to the amount of time we were given to complete it. It seems to me as though it was designed so that the person that could go through and finish the most would get the best grade. It could have been better if the questions were made harder (require more thought) instead of giving twice as many of them. To improve my own performance in this course, I would have created a slightly better (more simple) design so that we could spend more time on the design of our project and less time on the manufacturing. I would have also organized my time better so that the assembly process could go smoother and we could have time to figure out issues that pop up.