Kyle's Reflection

Since I am a junior in Mechanical Engineering, I know a lot of people who have taken this course, and the reason i did not take it last year was not entirely because i transferred in from LS&A my sophomore year. The workload i had heard this class would need from me scared me away because i thought my schedule was too hard at the time. As the class started, I realized that this fear was real, and that this class would require a lot of work. What scared me the most was that I did not have a clue what i was doing in the design and manufacturing area.

Once we got our teams together and I realized that my teammates had a lot of experience with design and manufacturing, I was intimidated and excited all at the same time. Between class and work with my team mates i was able to learn a lot about design and manufacturing. I also realized that i have a lot of good ideas about design, and that i just don't know how to apply them into manufacturing. Throughout the semester I learned a lot about manufacturing, and how to work as a team and make something great.

Never have i been under such strict time constraints for such a large project. Everyone on the team needed to bring a lot of effort to the table during manufacturing and with so many things due so often we had to meet very often and provide strict timetables to get everything done. This was a great learning experience for work in real life.

As a team i think we had a lot of fun and building our robot and competing with it was a lot of fun. Seeing all of our hard work perform, and quite well, i might add, was very reassuring and cool. The competition part of the class was very cool, but I think there should be more benefits for doing well.

Also, I do not believe that the motors were powerful enough to be effective with some of the more creative machines, such as ours. Even at the highest gear ratio, the double gear motor did not provide enough power for our machine to move around effectively, even though our machine was not that heavy.

Although this class provides a lot of good lessons and helps people come together for a common goal, I believe we wasted a lot of time in the beginning of the semester coming up with individual ideas that did not pertain in some cases to anything we would work on later. Also, I think we should have had some individual projects to manufacture something on each type of machine (i.e. lathe, mill, band saw, drill press). I think this would help tremendously because if students like myself come in without any knowledge of the machines, they end up only being able to do work on a couple of machines, especially since there are such strict time restraints. I know this was the case when I was doing work on the machine and i'm sure that other students feel the same way as I do.