As this was my first experience with the entire design and manufacturing process, I have learned a great deal about this process as a whole. The first concepts that I learned in this class that I know will be of value in the future, were the steps to the design process. Although I am typically very good at the creative process, it really helped me to organize the process by separating it into parts (i.e. strategies, concepts, modules). In addition, I learned a lot about Solidworks how to use the program to model my ideas. As we began to manufacture, we realized that some of the parts that were created in Solidworks were not as easy to create in the machine shop. From this I learned that not all ideas could easily be created even with the great amounts of technology we have available to us. As a student, I need to have creative and innovative ideas but I also need to take manufacturability into consideration. This class also taught me a great deal about manufacturing. Before this class, I did not have any experience in machining. Now, after getting the opportunity to fabricate parts on all of the various machines, I have gained a lot of experience. Overall this class provided a great environment for me to gain the design and manufacturing experience that I had not gotten in other aspects of my college experience.
Because this class was very demanding in terms of what we were asked to accomplish in a small amount of time, I also learned to work efficiently with a team. I learned that no one person could do this project entirely by himself or herself and that it was helpful to have others to bounce ideas off of. We found that if we were all in the machine shop together it worked best to have two of us working on one task while the other two worked on something else. This way no one was forced to take soul responsibility for a part and you could use both of your knowledge to manufacture. We as a team quickly learned each of our strengths and weaknesses and because of that, we found the most efficient ways to divide and complete our work.
After making my way through this course, I have considered some changes that could be made to improve the course for future students:
1) The teams should be assigned at the beginning of the semester and should be assigned rather than hand picked by the students. Luckily, I wound up in a group that had a good amount of past experience in fields that applied to this class but I know others were not so lucky. Had we all filled out a survey describing our background in manufacturing and design I feel the teams would have been much more evenly distributed and some of the groups would not have struggled as much as they did.
2) More time should be spent in the machine shop practicing before the students are set lose independently on the machines. Because I worked only on the mill during the FAB labs, when my team asked that I use the mill, I felt completely lost. Thankfully, Bob, John, and other students were always willing to answer my sometimes-trivial questions.
3) Overall, this class needs to be more focused. The entire semester I had issues determining what specifically I was supposed to gain from the class. There was simply too much going on and because of that, it made every assignment feel worthless. With all the Milestones, Homework assignments, Labs and Design Reviews I was lost and frustrated that everything felt like busy work.
4) Also, because there is so much information in each lecture, I feel that a short quiz at the beginning of each lecture on the previous lecture’s content would be much more valuable that an exam on all of the lectures that is nearly impossible to study for efficiently. The exam also distracted from the huge amounts of work that needed to be done on the robot.
In summary, I gained a lot of valuable experience and information from this class but for the most part, I was disappointed with the class as a whole.
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