Mario's Reflection

Bloggers,

It's been an exciting semester for the High Rollers. We laughed, we cried, we ate Panda Express, and we engineered.  Although our tragic elimination early in the competition was disappointing, we are grateful to our fans all over the world for their support throughout this Balltower season.

The design process was not an easy one, to say the least.  We went through several concepts and faced more than a few obstacles and had to adjust strategies and designs to overcome them.  One of the main things I think I learned about the design process is the importance of building/prototyping as early as possible.  While fine tuning our design we thought about as many factors as we could but when you have an idea of how a system is supposed to work, it is easy to think everything will work out how it should instead of thinking about how components may not interact the way you want them to or something may just not work at all.  Getting feedback from outside perspectives through design reviews and meetings with Serge did help us consider many things we didn't on our own and we were able to identify and address some of these issues.  Our original ball collection design, which relied on hinged acrylic flaps stopping the balls from rolling out from under our machine, would not have been able to retain control of the balls as we drove off the hill due to their size.  We adjusted our design for this and made immobile front flaps to keep the balls under control while we drove back onto the level surface of the field.   We faced a major setback on the first day we were able to actually test our machine when we realized our single front axle design seriously inhibited the maneuverability of our machine and a miscalculation in our collection arm design limited our ability to execute the original strategy of getting the red squash balls from the top of the hill.  I'm confident these are 2 issues we would have been more than able to handle but were just discovered too late for us to properly fix them.  Luckily our arm design did still allow us to collect balls from the ground level of the arena as well as reach the black balls on the hillside.  The former became our final strategy for the competition.

I think our team worked together very well.  We had regular meetings for planning and working on assignments prior to manufacturing and very effectively compartmentalized tasks to most efficiently complete our work on time.  We didn't have any real issues with time management, we all held each other accountable and were responsible about getting our work done.  We developed good team chemistry pretty early on which really helped us have good communication and made meetings and collaboration more enjoyable.

The lectures for the course definitely had a lot of valuable information and a lot of it helped with our machine design.  I think there were times where I felt a disconnect with the lectures and lab and it was hard to tell what material was being emphasized in lecture as being important. I think homework assignments or practice problems similar to questions that would later be on the exam would have helped focus our studying and emphasized relevant information.

I think I put in a good amount of time and effort into the course. An area where I could have improved would have been studying more for the exam and making sure I had a better grasp of all the material from lecture although the review sessions and office hours were very helpful.

Overall, this was a good course. At least for me, it was the first class I had where I was able to go through the entire engineering design and manufacturing process and I think it was a good introduction.  I'm excited to continue on and tackle more complicated design problems in courses to come.


Peace out,
Mario