Ilya's Personal reflection

There were a lot of new concepts that I learned about in ME 250. Working with Solidworks was my first exposure with CAD, and while it proved to be fairly challenging it is a valuable skill to have and was a necessary step in becoming a better Mechanical Engineer. The manufacturing part of the course was especially interesting to me, as I was excited to learn and work in the machine part. It is something that I enjoyed and learned a lot from and gave me a better sense of direction as to what type of engineering I want to do later in life.
Another aspect that was especially important was teamwork and time management. Our team had trouble coordinating when all four people were working together, and often times one or two people were not being very productive because most of the work was not made for four people to work on. It was also a lot easier to get off track and not be efficient with our time when working with everyone. To my surprise, working in teams of two was a lot more efficient and a lot more work could get done with two teams working on different aspects of the project.
My performance in this course is not what I had hoped it to be. This class was a lot more demanding than I had thought it would be, and my performance was limited because of the demands from my other classes. I felt that a lot of decisions were made in a rush, which never turned out well. Also, a lot of measurements were not made very well, and along with not giving a lot of room for error, this proved to cause a lot of errors. By the end of the project, we had much more success because we accounted for error in our measurements and our manufacturing.
I felt that the course could be improved in several ways. The first and foremost would be to have a lot more information about the assembly and manufacturing available before the start of those parts of the course. For example, our MCM was our cart, and the information about how to couple motors to axles, and how to constrict the wheels on the axles. When asking the GSI, their answer was that they had not come to a consensus at that time. Also, the thicker aluminum angle stock for pillow blocks was also made available too late for us. Having had information about these things earlier would have greatly benefitted our final machine. I would also like to add that a lot of the contents of our kit were not used, and probably cost a lot of money to be supplied. I think it would be better to have some general materials that everyone uses available to be in stock, but other materials such as magnets or gears or springs to be suggested, and be ordered online by the team through a set budget given to every team. This would save a lot of money and allow greater flexibility to the teams to be more creative. Also I think that The Arena was too constricting in its design. There were a limited amount of strategies we could use, and getting the balls in the bins through the cones was so much of a challenge that no one even attempted to score points that way. Similarly, the squash balls and the ball filled with sand were unrealistic to lift for almost every team, and were not even sought after by most. Making the game easier would allow for more creativity and more successful designs.