Dave Huston's Individual Reflection

This was a very interesting class for me. In high school I was part of two different robotics teams so I was very excited on the first day of class when I found out we would be building ping pong ball machines. I got to do a lot of manufacturing on those teams in high school, so a lot of this class was material I had come in contact with before, but there was a lot of new material I learned as well. The importance of design and analysis, time management, and attention to detail were all important lessons I learned in ME 250 this semester.

I learned a lot about the design process. In high school, and in other projects I've done I've just rushed into the building phase, and I've seen the way a lot of those poorly planned projects turned out. Going through and deconstructing the problem, analyzing it, and designing a solution was new to me. I loved the CAD aspect, of the class, and being able to essentially create our machine entirely on a computer before ever having to pick up the building materials. I also got to see first hand how important attention to detail is, and how even one sloppy hole can throw your entire machine off. All in all the whole design and manufacturing portion of the class was invaluable.

I had heard the stories from older students about past ME 250 classes, and to be honest I was sort of expecting a blow off class, or at the very least a class that would be not too difficult. I was caught off guard by the work load, but after I got over that it became more manageable. I feel like one thing that could really improve in the class would be the manufacturing and materials lectures. As far as manufacturing goes, a lot of the things we learned are hard to understand until you actually use the machine, so some of the lectures, I felt were not super helpful, until after we had started building. The materials lectures were interesting, but I felt like a lot of what was taught was followed by, "Don't worry, you'll learn this in ME 350 or 450." I feel like it would have been more beneficial to learn more CAD, or possibly a different CAD program, rather than do all of the lectures we did. This is, however, coming from someone who spent four year in high school working on a robot team with professional engineers.

My performance could have been improved by putting forth more effort to the class at the begging of the semester. Towards the end I was averaging probably about 6 hours a day in the shop with my team, but I could have worked harder on the earlier milestones. My early designs were probably not what they could have been, had I been giving it my all earlier on.

All in all, the new ME 250 was a great class, lots of work, but a great class. It was sort of a reminder of why I am an engineering student. Seeing out team's design, which was an idea in our heads two months ago become a working machine is what I love about the whole thing.