Ryan Rodeman's Individual Reflection

Before I say anything else about ME 250, I’d just like to say that this was easily the most fun I’ve had in a class at the University of Michigan so far. That being said, I also learned quite a bit in the class. Before ME 250 I had never done any kind of manufacturing. In this class, not only did I learn was a lathe, mill, and laser cutter were but I learned how to use them and use them properly. There were so many things about manufacturing that I learned, such as tolerances and what kind of parts need to have what tolerances.

I learned a lot more in ME 250 than just about manufacturing though, I also learned quite a bit about design and design principles. Before this class I always thought design wasn’t quite as important as the manufacturing, but I learned that a good design can go very far. First off, the better the design, the easier the manufacturing can be.  I learned that design is actually a very important process, like the Balltower competition was for us, when given some sort of problem or situation that you need to solve, first thing you should always do is come up with a design to help solve said problem. When designing, it’s very important to keep design principles in mind. Some of the more useful one’s for our team’s design included Occam’s Razor, keeping things simple, Repeatability, the ability to do the same action over and over, and Exact Constraint, the number of points at which a body is held is equal to the number of degrees of freedom that are to be restrained. Design was a huge part of what I learned in ME 250.

Teamwork and time management were also key to what we learned in ME 250. Teamwork was essential for the project. Everything we did was as a team so learning to work well in a team setting was crucial. One very helpful way to learn how to deal with future possible problems was the lecture with Russ Pitts. His lecture was both fun and informative, and very helpful. I am really glad that my team worked so well together and we did not have any problems along the way. I learned quite a lot about proper time management from this class. With a full semester course load it can be very difficult to find time to work on everything I need to do. In ME 250, especially, where the project is very time consuming, it is extremely important to make sure that my time is managed well. For this project I was able to do that. I learned how to properly manage all of my time so I could succeed in this class as well as all my other classes.

In my opinion, as I stated before, this class was very fun and interesting, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. The biggest problem I had with the class was the lectures were bland and seemed almost unnecessary to attend in order to really do well in the class. All the necessary information that was given in lecture was on the slides so one didn’t really need to show up to lecture. Also, like I said, the lectures were bland. Maybe there could have been more interaction, such as the iClickers used towards the end of the semester. Other than the problems with lecture, I thought the rest of the class was run very well.

Lastly, I believe my course performance could have been improved in various ways. First off, time management, though my time management improved with the class, it always could improve even more. Other than this I felt like I worked very hard and feel like I did about as well in the class as I could.

In conclusion, I had a lot of fun in this class, but more importantly I learned a lot about design/manufacturing and teamwork/time management. Most importantly the skills I learned in this class I can use in real life situations in the future.