In developing this project, the group members learned many things. Not only were new engineering concepts learned, but team dynamics and the need for thorough documentation was demonstrated. As an instructor, each of us would be very pleased with what the scale project requires the students to do.
In the project, we tried to incorporate several ideas from science and some specific engineering areas. Physics plays a central role in this project. Regardless of how the students design their scales, physics will play a major role.
Mechanical engineering also plays a critical role in this project. While designing our solution to the problem (a moving pivot scale), we were exposed to the idea of gear reduction. As CSE students, we had had no contact with this particular aspect of mechanical engineering. However, it ended up being critical to the success of our design.
It is our hope that some Freshmen taking the course will choose to design a moving pivot scale so that he or she can appreciate all of the small details that must be considered. Starting out, we identified a few major problems to solve. However, in solving these problems, new problems arose. This is a common occurrence in design, and the scale project certainly demonstrated this phenomena.
The most important skill outside of engineering that this project develops is the ability to work as a team. Coming in, the students will have little or no team design experience. Working in a team is of great importance in the "real world," and the sooner students are exposed to it, the better. The scale project requires that the problem be broken down into identifiable sub-problems. These sub-problems should be assigned to each team member. It is the studentsÕ responsibility to identify and assign these sub-problems.
Programming skills will also be enhanced. In our design, we wrote six and a half pages of control code. Granted, it is certainly not the most efficient code possible, but it gets the job done. Learning the Lego Logo language was a unique experience (getting past the lack of a while statement required some creativity!), and the real-time feedback of the system will be something completely new to incoming Freshmen.
When assessing the success of a groupÕs project, the instructor should not be overly concerned about the accuracy of the scale. Accuracy is certainly an important consideration, but if a particular group cannot meet the 5 gram accuracy requirement, it should not severely affect the grade. What is most important about this project is the development process used to create the design, and the documentation of the design.
The documentation is the single most important aspect of this project. The report should be written very clearly. Freshmen engineers must learn as soon as possible that just designing something does not make it a viable product. The accompanying documentation is absolutely critical to the success of any project.
As shown in the example report, use of figures and clearly identifiable equations is very important. The inclusion of user interface screen shots is a nice addition, and should be worth some extra points. Also, including the derivation of the equations used should also merit some bonus points.
In the lab handout, the various aspects that determine the grade were purposely left as percentages so that the instructor may decide the total number of points that the project is worth. When designing our solution to the problem, we found that a single design provides more than enough challenge, even for senior engineering students. Since our group is composed only of CSE students, we were as good test group for doing the design, as none of us had any mechanical engineering abilities. In that way, we were much like the incoming Freshman, as we had to experiment a little bit to discover what needed to be done, especially when it came to getting the gearing on the pivot correct.
One item that was sorely needed throughout the development of the project was an accurate scale. We used the mail scale in the Engineering office, but it was not accurate enough for our puposes. It gave measurements in ounces, and the smallest measurement possible was .1 oz. This made it difficult to accurately rate the performance of our design. A good electronic device would have been very nice to use.
We believe the Lego Scale Project would be an ideal learning tool for Freshmen engineering students. It is a straightforward problem that has many solutions and is really a bit more difficult than it at first seems. We feel it is at just the right level for a Freshman engineer, and that it will be a challenging learning experience.