Weblog Final Documentation - Individual Reflection by Mac Van Loon

I really enjoyed my time in ME250. After hearing what previous courses were like and how easy they were I feel like I will be more prepared for ME350. The lectures were very informative and gave a lot of good information about design and manufacturing. I often used them as a reference when I had questions about designing parts such as constraints and gearing. While the machine shop experience was not unfamiliar ground to me I still thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I found it much more difficult to machine in the busy environment of the ME shop than at a more organized business.

Teamwork was a very important aspect in this course. I feel like our team did not click right away and we had our disagreements but we managed to keep it professional and work very efficiently together. We were very good at bringing all of our ideas together and giving each other advice. Our team also did a good job at breaking up the tasks. During part of the manufacturing I worked on the arm mechanism with Corwin while Vince and Mike worked on the car. We had a lot of speed bumps to overcome when manufacturing our machine and I felt that our team did an excellent job coming up with creative solutions to our problems. In the end we designed and manufactured a very effective machine.

Our team did a good job with time management. We made an effort before all of our meetings were over to determine what was on our agenda for next meeting and when we would be able to get together again. There were a few cases where it was hard to get our schedules to match up so we were not always able to start meetings with every team member there. In these cases we would make sure to let the team members that couldn’t make it in time what had happened at the meeting. I believe that we could have taken less time manufacturing our machine if it weren’t for the large number of problems we had with the car.

I felt that the course has improved from what it used to be. I understand that it was a new system but I would have liked it if the course was more organized from the start. It would have been nice to have known what was in the kit and what all of the rules and electronics were before we started designing. Some of the homework that we had to do was very long and I wish that it was more relevant to what we were working on for our project. Other than the homework and the lack of information in the beginning I felt that ME250 was a successful course that helped to give students the needed experience in CAD and in the ME shop to do well in future design courses. I believe that my performance in the course was good but I think that I could have worked harder in the later design stages. I would have liked to have finished manufacturing the machine earlier so that we could have had more time to practice and work out bugs. It would have also have been nice to have this time to possibly find a way to get the squash balls.