Today the groups had their first prototype evaluation. The roof group sketched their entire system on the white board so that Dr. Saterbak could easily see how all of the components of the system fit together. We learned the sensors originally ordered were volume dependent which would not be good for the roof (since the roof has different size trays), and so new sensors had to be ordered. A large part of prototyping is testing components to see if they actually work the way you want them too. Sometimes they don’t, and you have to start over and try something else. The group still has electronics that need to be connected to the computer, and so the last weeks of school will be devoted to synthesizing all of the components together.

The groups finally have gotten their hands dirty as they begin prototyping in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK). It’s amazing how designs will succeed or fail once you starting modeling them. From drill presses to k’nex, floaties to cardboard, the room is teeming with exitement . The forearm team has a set of accelerometers they’re experimenting with. The wheelchair group is experimenting with three dimensional gears, and the surrey and roof teams are continuing to refine their prototypes as the designs are finally starting to become a reality.

pictures of prototyping, click to enlarge them:

It has been absolutely inspirational to see the change in mood in the room now that the students are actually putting their plans into action. However, I think today many groups hit their first obstacle when they realized that the solutions might be more difficult to create than previously thought.

For example, the surrey group realized that their permanent fold out box actually caused discomfort to passengers. The team came together with the apprentice leaders and faculty to evaluate and then decide to redesign the storage space to be removable. This is only one of the several examples of how the students have actually learned the importance of a reiterative prototyping design process.

In the team meetings the groups have also began evaluating what different materials, structure, calibration requirements, and hinges the final design might require.

After the apprentice leaders met with Dr. Volz to learn how to coach presentations, we were prepared to watch the ENGI 120 students with a keen eye for common presentation faux paus. These included everything from “ums,” tense body language, a “question” or “?” slide, and how the students fielded questions.

I was pretty confident after watching the student’s practice presentations that these ENGI 120 students would do far better than we had previously imagined freshman students would do. And I have to say, I was still impressed with the presentations the day of. The students were eloquent, clearly enthusiastic, and yet professional. I was impressed with their designs and coolness on the spot when it came to technical questions. The surrey group had even constructed a little model to better explain the different design options.

However as newly trained coaches, we were noticing and writing down comments on possible areas of improvement for the students including talking speed and pauses.

Overall, we were impressed with the extraordinary group of freshman engineering students in ENGI 120. We were especially impressed with how engaged the presenter’s peers were during the different student presentations. Many of the students asked their peers great specific, technical questions at the end. I guess our skit on good and bad questions paid off!

One of the final lectures the students of ENGI 120 received before their mid-semester presentations were due was one on how to prepare and give oral presentations and how to ask constructive questions after a presentation. This entire lecture was a tag team effort between Dr. Saterbak, Dr. Volz and all the Apprentice Leaders.

The first portion of the lecture was handled by Dr. Saterbak who explained the CATME evaluation system to the students. This technique has been used by the teams to evaluate each of the members and will contribute to their overall grade.

The next part of the lecture consisted of Dr. Saterbak presenting to the class about how to design a good presentation for a design proposal. This included the strategies required to make an effective presentation and also how to conduct oneself during a presentation.

The final part of the presentation was an interesting Skit on how to ask good questions, done by the ALs. We gave a very short presentation on a sandal that detected metal and provided product descriptions. This was followed by the remainder of the ALs asking a variety of questions, both good and bad, and the presenting ALs showing the students how to answer questions politely and effectively.

It can be really fun and easy to throw out many ideas during the brainstorming process regardless of how practical they are. The topic of this class was the hard part: evaluating these ideas to determine the best design choice. Dr. Saterbak described two different design evaluation tools. She also stressed that the brainstorming and evaluation process is an iterative process. When evaluating solutions, new and potentially better ideas often come to mind.

The first evaluation tool is a morph chart. This chart organizes the brainstorming ideas into solutions for specific functions and attributes. The best combination of design solutions can be chosen from the possibilities. The second is a priority checkmark matrix that evaluates the solutions based on their ability to meet the design criteria and satisfy the constraints. The design criteria are rated based on a checkmark system; therefore, the solutions that meet highly rated design criteria receive the highest scores. Dr. Saterbak ended the lecture by stressing that these evaluation tools are only valuable and useful if supporting data dictates the evaluation numbers.

Apoorv and I worked with the OEDK roof after the lecture. We discussed the brainstorming memo and talked in more detail about how the sensors would connect to the control system. Some of this may require some programming skills, or the system can potentially be designed with on/off switches. More evaluation tools will be discussed on Thursday, and then the groups will turn in a memo using these evaluation matrices.

A critical part of any project revolves around research and in depth study of the problem, current and potential solutions, etc. At the same time, it is also very important to be able to document technical details and support arguments in a proper manner. While the teams had already been making use of technical memos at each stage of the design process, to document their findings, this lecture was meant to provide them with a clear purpose for their efforts, and ways that they could improve their presentation.

A great deal of emphasis was laid on how to structure the technical memos, especially using the idea that the most important information needs to be put first, and then must follow a sequential order of significance. Another very important point made was that as engineers, we must be able to quantify our objectives and arguments as much as possible and use graphs and tables to illustrate our point better rather than being vague and qualitative. A set of activities were carried out to encourage the students to be able to critically analyse technical memos and writing styles in engineering.

The next part of the lecture and the area that the ALs were most involved in was around the subject of research and search tools. The students were told to not only to try to use the right tools, but also to make sure that they were asking the right question. Given the information overload that occurs today with the Internet especially, it is crucial that students starting their research careers are able to sift through all the information and sort out the good from the bad. The concept of peer reviewed papers and primary literature was also introduced and, examples of places where these could be found and referenced were mentioned, such as Google Scholar, etc. Following the lecture, the apprentice leaders spent some time with the teams discussing the tools at hand and showing them how to use them to find specific data relevant to their projects. Some time was also spent starting some of the preliminary research for each of the teams, in order to get them started on the information accumulation.