Hope everyone is having a great semester so far. Can you believe we are already at the end of week 4? As we all try to get our heads around this engineering gig, I bet some courses have got you scratching your head, and maybe you are wondering what happens in the second year. So, guess what? We’re diving straight into some course reviews.
ENGSCI 211 : Math Modelling II
This course, essentially a Part II version of MM1, has already been covered by many bloggers, so I’ll keep my thoughts concise. Compared to MM1 this course felt more “mathy” there were more topics where algebra skills were more essential, but it was definitely very doable and I enjoyed it more than MM1. The team behind the course was stellar, ensuring everything was streamlined and offering ample resources for practice. The Piazza forum was consistently active. All things considered, this was one of my favourite courses from the previous semester.
MECHENG 201: Introduction to Mechatronics
Overview:
As you probably would have guessed by the name, this is the most “mechatronics” like course mechatronics students will take in the second year. As I mentioned in the previous blog the second year, mechatronics has a lot of heavy mechanical papers, but this is not one of them. In this course, we touch base and start delving into control systems which lies the foundation for more complex analysis of them in the third year we also did some simple implementations of the control systems onto vex robots via C to correct for issues such as unequal distribution of power by the motors among a list of a whole lot of other issues the robots have :)))))). The second part of the course focused on electronics where we covered a many different electronic components and where they could be used and we also did some basic sensor/actuator circuit design and again laid foundations for the future course.
Labs
These were my favourite but also most hated sessions of the week, it feels very satisfying when your code for the robot works and everything goes to according the plan of course frustrating moments are almost a given. BUT the actual content of the labs aside these were weekly 8am labs, and as someone that doesn’t live very close to campus I can say they contributed to worsening my sleep depravity even more 😊. My advice would be definitely try to code up your intended functions BEFORE the lab and only use the time within the lab to test your code, there are limited contact hours with the robot and the consensus has been its not possible to get more contact hours(labs are booked out) so make the most of every session. Once the vex project is finished the next set of labs is for sensors and actuators which is very simple are nothing much to be worried about.
Test and Exam
The tests and exams for this course were pretty straight forward, nothing too out of the blue. The test this year was based on just the first half of the course which was control theory while the exam was entirely on electronics(to those who disliked the circuit analysis in ELECTENG 101 don’t worry the circuit analysis in this course is actually much simpler)
MECHENG 242: Mechanics of Materials I
Overview:
This course is the continuation of ENGGEN 121 from the first year combined with very minor bits from CHEMMAT 121, and amazingly 121 + 121 is 242 🤯. For those who didn’t enjoy CHEMMAT 121 there is no stress(haha get it), because most content in this course builds off the statics section. But if you didn’t like statics in ENGGEN 121 oh boy you are in for a hard time because things get a lot harder in this course. The course focuses on analysing the behaviour of load-carrying elements, we started by looking at single stress states then went into single stress states around different axis causing varying effects to the element, and went on into combined stress states and finished off with the hardest section which is multiple loading scenarios leading into a multi stress state problem. You probably noticed from the title “Mechanics of Materials I“, yes there is a second part to this course, but mechatronics students would not need to take the part III version of this course(yay!).
Labs
The labs for this course are very chill, you do the lab and write a short report or fill out the sheet during the lab session honestly not too much to it.
Tests and Exam
There were two tests and an exam for this course, one test after each lecturer finishes their section. The tests were overall not too bad apart from test 1 where the average was pretty poor. But you would definitely need to put in the work and do the practice questions in order to do well in this course, there are question types where it can get confusing but there are weekly tutorials you can attend to get help with those.
MECHENG 235: Design and Manufacture 1
Overview:
From the get-go, I’ll tell you that this is my least favourite course not just last sem but in the two years so far. This is sort of the mechanical continuation of ENGGEN 115 where we look deeper into technical design by doing projects, but this course still has a lot of theory. This course is mainly based on two projects the Warman project and the gear reducer project. Similar to 115 this course has all theory delivered in the lectures and in the twice-a-week tutorials that’s when you meet up with your team and work on the projects. The theory that was delivered wasn’t very engaging to me and there was just so much thrown at you. The one thing I did enjoy about this course was the synthesis challenge where you had to optimise two-gear ratio scenarios which I found very fun to do
Labs:
The labs weren’t too bad but most people were pretty confused without the TAs explaining the majority of the things as there were just so many different types of different things covered in the lectures. A lot of the labs focused on identifying which component is which in parts of actual machines like cars.
I won’t go into too much detail for this because I know Julie(mechanical engineering blogger) has gone into great depth uncovering this course so if you want to find out more about it go check out her post!
That’s all for me from now, best of luck for your upcoming tests and assignments and stay tuned for the next post 🙂