Final Reflection by Kevin Leach

Final Reflection
by Kevin Leach


In ME250 I learned a lot about some of the most important parts of the design process including teamwork, design and manufacturing, time management, and the most common components used in a manufacturing based environment. Throughout the semester it was very evident how important teamwork was. What I realized was that teamwork can be far more successful than individualized work when done properly. By collaborating ideas and using each person’s strengths to execute them in an efficient manner what can be accomplished by a group can only be constrained by deadlines or cost, not by lack of knowledge. Design and manufacturing was definitely the most crucial part of the design process. What I learned was that the more detailed your final design was after deciding on general strategies and concepts, the easier it made the manufacturing. I also learned that you should complete all design for a module and if possible test it using 3D modeling on a computer to make sure everything fits together properly before manufacturing of the individual pieces because if a part is made to the wrong size, that material is often unusable. This can become costly if parts are had to be repeatedly remade. Tied into teamwork, design and manufacturing is time management. Time management is crucial to each of these components of the design process. In the business world, as in this class, deadlines are set based off of costs and expected income. If these deadlines are to be met decisions must be made in the design of a product based off of its functional requirements so that it can be manufactured with enough time for testing. If we don’t set deadlines than we may just keep redesigning with the desire to make something perfect instead of viable and then nothing essentially gets finished or it takes so long to complete that it becomes too costly. So, regarding time management I’ve learned to set your own deadlines for completion ahead of schedule to allow an ample amount of testing time so that overlooked flaws can be fixed. I was also glad to learn in more detail about the basic individual components used in design like gears, bearings, fasteners, etc. In learning about the specs of these components, how they work, and what they are most commonly used for it helped me better visualized them working together.

In thinking about how the course can improve, I can honestly say that it was very easy to tell that this was the first semester after the class had been restructured. Information that would help the students was often given to us at inopportune often later than needed times. This like detailed grading rubrics for assignments, tips on manufacturing or putting stuff together, what’s in the kit, what the final arena would look like, etc. There was just a lot of little changes that were made throughout the semester that it would have been helpful if we knew them sooner. A lot of this probably won’t be an issue in the future if the class remains the same but how everything is going to be just needs to be finalized at the beginning of the semester. I also especially would have liked to know what’s in the kit at the beginning of the term, this would have helped a lot with the early individual strategy and concept assignments. I also think that the arena could be improved so that there are most possibilities of scoring and moving around. As we saw, everyone had some type of arm because the slot was so tight fitting around the balls that that’s the only way you could get to them and thus the rest of the arena wasn’t even used by any team (like the holes and bins). Lastly, regarding the exam, I agreed with reducing the percentage of what it was worth for our grade but I think in making the test longer than one could possibly finish in the allotted time was not beneficial at all for us students. With the shear length of the test one was simply rushing through it the hole time scrambling to get as many points as they could instead of showing what they really know and can produce. If the test was shorter and one could focus more on the problems they could perform better and learn more from the experience, you don’t learn anything scrambling for points because of lack of time.

I think I could have improved our performance in the course by being more detailed in our design before we started manufacturing. This would have made our arm especially run more smoothly than what it did. I think that we could have made some better choices in the materials we used with what we were given. We probably should have made our arm out of wood so that it was lighter and thus wouldn’t have taken as much torque to rotate it especially since our shaft was small. I also think we should have made our defense cart bigger and heavier and chosen a different way of coupling the rear wheels to the double gear box. The functional requirement of the cart was to get in the way and stop any forward movement of the opposite team’s cart and with these changes we would have better met this requirement.