Subject Code/Name: ENGG1000 - Introduction to Engineering Design and Innovation Contact Hours: 2 hour common lecture (for the first 4 weeks), 1 hour technical lecture (MECH Stream), 1 hour mentoring session per week
Assumed Knowledge: None
Assessment: Depends on the project chosen but this was the assessment outline for Project ARDET:
Impromptu Design Writing Task - 5%
Problem Statement Presentation - 5%
Design Challenge Calculations - 3%
Team Presentation - 5%
Individual Design Report - 5%
Hardware Lab Report - 5%
Design Challenge Testing - 7%
Design Proposal Report - 10%
Compliance Testing - 10%
Design Journal (checked twice) - 10%
Final Testing - 20%
Final Report - 10%
Lecture Recordings? For common lectures, there are lecture recordings but uploaded very late. For technical lectures, no.
Notes/Materials Available: Depends on what project you chose.
Textbook: Dym, C.L. and Little, P. (2014). Engineering Design: A Project-Based Introduction, 4th edition, John Wiley and Sons but we never used it so no need to purchase it.
Lecturer(s): Lecturers are mainly the student mentors and project coordinators and always changed each week.
Year & Trimester of completion: T1 2019
Difficulty: 3/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Comments: This is the type of course where you spend a whole term in a group project. They made changes to the way ENGG1000 works. It used to be you choose what kind of stream you wanted to go into (e.g. ELEC, MECH etc.) but this year we chose from a range of projects that were multidisciplinary. Project ARDET was mainly mechanical but there was also mechatronics, software and electrical engineering involved. Project ARDET required us to build an autonomous vehicle that can pick up balls and travel through an obstacle course. Because we haven't been taught things like vehicle performance modelling or programming, it was challenging to finish the project since we mainly taught ourself how to build the vehicle. Even the project coordinators and mentors weren't expecting much in the final testing. On the final testing day, most of the vehicles didn't work (i.e. motors were fried, servos broke, wheels fell off) and our final testing marks were moderated.
I didn't mind the course. The assessments weren't too bad. It was just a bit annoying that they threw in the Design Challenge in the middle of the term, so we were scrambling to finish our prototype for the compliance testing (which was the week after). I was also lucky to be put into a good group. When we chose the project, I had to complete a survey about my skills and how I worked in groups and they used that to create the groups. I personally found it beneficial because I was put in a group where we had different skills (some of the members were comfortable with writing the code, others were comfortable with construction, I was comfortable with the report component).
The common lecture was very boring. It was hard to stay awake during those lectures because they were going through standard soft skills like how to work in a group, how to write a problem statement (which does link to one of the assessments), how to do group presentations etc. A lot of us left halfway and by the last common lecture, no one really showed up because my group would prefer using that 2 hours working on the project.