Teaching Activities

About

From the dept. website:
Examines mechanical design of functional, pragmatic products from inception through implementation, including topics in computer-aided-design (CAD). Discusses the design process in the context of product redesign assignments using CAD. Includes a final design project with professional documentation including sketches, detailed and assembly CAD drawings, a comprehensive written design analysis, and cost breakdown.

My approah:
The first thing I want my student walking out of this class is to equipped them with strong CAD/solid modeling skill - an essential tool for any mechanical engineer nowaday. The project-based learning approach that I adopted in the teaching of this class ensure that every students in my class are proficient with Pro|Engineer, but also comfortable to learn other CAD packages in a short period of time.

I also put a lot of emphasis on report writing - a skill that a lot of students lacking. Hence, from the very first project in my class, student are required to turn in an 'engineering technical report' quality project report. Though this frustrate many students while they are taking the class, they often come back and tell me how grateful they are to have an instructor to actually tell them how to write a report -- after they graduated.

1. CAD

Projects
I divided the semester into 3 phases. In Phase 1, students focus on learning various solid modeling techniques as well as report writing, creating web-protfolio, etc. In Phase 2, they use the solid modeling skills that they have learned to apply in a product re-design project and a reverse engineering of a product. In Phase 3, students use what they have learned to create a product of their own as the course final project. In between the phases, there are two in-class hands on solid modeling test to assess their learning progress.

Phase 1
There are total of 6 small projects, 2 mid-size projects and 1 final project made up the course. The 6 small projects consist of 1 survey paper and 5 CAD projects. The survey paper helps students investigate/discover various kind of CAD packages (other than Pro|E). The 5 CAD projects are tutorial-based, for student to learn solid modeling techniques in a step-by-step manner. These projects are designed for cascaded learning of various solid modeling techniques used in mechanical design, as well as familiarizing student to other requirements in the class, such as creating a web-portfolio, writing technical report. The turn around time for these projects are usually 1 week, making it easy for the instructor to quickly point out mistakes student make in report and web-portfolio. Samples of Project 4 (deal with Advance Rendering Module in Pro|E) and 5 (deal with Design Animation module in Pro|E) are shown below.

Phase 2
There are two mid-size projects in this phase. Each of them took 2 to 2.5 weeks to complete. The first project involved indentifying dimensional problems in a 2D sketches of an adjustable wrench and correct them. The goal of this project are: (i) to show the advantage of 3D solid modeling; (ii) to have student use their engineering knowledge to correct those problem and re-model the wrench with Pro|E. This project also serve as a good segway for student to use the solid modeling techniques in modeling an product -- without any step-by-step instructions like those projects in phase 1. The 2^nd project ask the student to search for an defective product from their household, do a reverse-engineer on the product: create solid model of the original product, suggest way to improve the product - and subsequently create a model of a redesign product. This allow student to learn why product failed and how design flaw can be fixed. It also allow student to look at an actual product and realize what are the necessary components needed to assemble a product. See "Engineering Design" tab for more detail and student project samples.

Phase 3 In the remaining semester, student work on their final project (and a group presentation). The final project required student to design a product of their choice from scratch. Student will first write a proposal (on what they want to do), and start working on their project by researching and comparing product that is close to their product of choice. They then create several design alternatives, and subsequently making design decision by eliminating design choices. After they finalized their design, CAD models were created. Student submit a final report and a web-portfolio of their final project, as well as present their design in class. See "Engineering Design" tab for more detail and student project samples.

2. Technical Writing

Surprisingly, many students came to the class with no idea on how to write a report. Hence, I required students to write a complete report for every single projects they did in class. Requirements for writing a report is stressed in the first project, and student were ask to follow these requirements strickly. Most students didn't like it, but at the end they realized this is important for them (especially after they work in the industry). Sample student reports are downloadble below.

3. Engineering Design

The first 1/3 of the semester aim to familiarize students with the design tool (Pro|Engineer is used) through various small projects (total of 5 projects). Once they have learned all the necessary modeling skills, it is time to introduce how these modeling tools can be used to assist them in product design. There are total of 3 large scale projects to achieve this goal: 1. Product Re-design of a Adjustable Wrench; 2. Reverse Engineering and re-design of a failed product; and (3) Product Design / Final project.

1. Re-design of an Adjustable Wrench. A 2D drawing of an adjustable wrench is given to student and they were asked to identify the dimensioning problems in the drawing. The 2D drawing, which is from an Engineering textbook, contained mistakes in which a hand-sketch / 2D drawing package could not identified. Through this exercise, students learn the importance of dimensioning, as well as benefits of 3D parametric modeling process - where this kind of mistake could be avoided easily.

2. Reverse Engineering and Re-design of an Product. In this project, student were ask to identify a product that either design badly or fail due to bad mechanical design - and suggest a re-design. Student then proceed to model the original product, then a re-design product. This project allow student to learn why things failed and how to design a better product. It also allow the student to realize that the modeling skills that they have learned thus far are adequate for them to model fairly complex shaped product. Finally, it also allows student to see the components needed in an actual product, how each components were assembled, before they work on design their own product in the final project.

3. Final Project. In this project, student were asked to design a product of their own choice. By allowing student to select their own product to design, students are more interested in their own project. The final project allows the student to experience the design process of a product. From conceptual design, decision making, elimination of design candidates, re-design, create 3D CAD models and 2D drawings, to presentation of the product. Which for many student, is their first time handling a project of such scale.

5. Evaluation

Survey
Two questionaires (one at the begining and one at the end of semester) were handout to the class in the past 3 semesters. I am in the process of preparing the results from these surveys.

Student Evaluation
Anonymous rating of the course is available at 'Rate My Professor.com' [ link ]

Recommendation letters from students
Available upon request.

Tutorial

Note: If you find this tutorial useful, you can consider a donation to motivate or just cheer me up with paypal. :)

Rights to use, citation
Many people are using this Tutorial for teaching and this is something that I would encourage. If you plan to duplicate the documentation for class use then every copy must include the front page of the original tutorial in PDF format.

If you want to cite the Toolbox please use:
Leng-Feng Lee and Vincent Kotovich, "Pro|Engineer Wildfire Design Animation Tutorial", University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, 2009. Available:"http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~llee3/"