A
The team made good progress on a project started in EW496 in spring of last year. Progress was very much hampered by covid, by access to space, slow purchasing, and changeover of customer from the 496 efforts, though I like very much that they are validating their requirements against multiple users -- most teams never do this. .
I have been working on transferring your report to Latex and Github to allow collaborative editing. It would help immensely if you can provide your original figures as their native file formats. I will also direct, moving forward, that you do not use any templates or rubrics provided by other professors without discussing with me first.
Minor comments will be handled via the Latex / Github repository. There are a few typos. The budget should have a disclaimer on the fake labor and overhead numbers which are done only for EW401 training purposes and should never be passed along to a sponsor without a disclaimer.
I do not fault the guys for this, but I believe the way EW401 is conducted sets teams up to fail. At other universities (e.g. MIT 2.007, MIT 2.008, and MIT 2.009) the charts and tools are taught within the first few weeks of the sophomore design class (2.007) without much ado. Here they are dragged out, distracting students from actually getting their designs done. These guys needed to be flying and trying stuff in August but could not, partially due to covid, but also in large part due to the design of EW401.
The format also unacceptably places the 401 instructor and course coordinator and a single customer in the prime position of shaping what the team does. As a result, I have less ability to guide them in the early phases of their project than others, even though ultimately I am the one who will have to help them finish and grade them at the end of capstone EW404.
The rubrics and templates warp their thinking and should be eliminated. There is a ridiculous 6 page rubric this year - it seeems to grow by a page each year. If I tried to evaluate technical work at Naval Reactors using the course coordinator's 6 page rubric, my section head and ADM Bowman would have thrown a desk across the room.
- Odd ways to cite and use references
- Two "problem statement" headings
- All criteria graded 0-4 with no actual test data or raw numerics
- Simplistic EW401 "block diagrams"
- Standards and specifications mention velcro! What value is added by this section? They otherwise had good ideas here but felt pushed to dilute their work with trivial stuff because of a rubric/template.
- Fake numbers in budget directed by rubric and templates
- WBS hours never tied to budget
- WBS starts every item with 1?!
- Ridiculously simple circuit diagrams when the team was very capable of more - because the rubrics and templates limit what they do.
- During design presentations, blind use of an example presentation (even including nicknames for team members just because a team did that before)
I understand the need to learn the thought process used by engineers to do design work, but the emphasis here is solely on PROCESS and any THOUGHT is generally accidentaly.
We need to do better providing them space and materials! The items they ordered in the summer only now are available.
At the PDR, we had a discussion about making their work accessible to non-engineers. I would much rather they had more of that sort of discussion which was very very valuable, rather than prolonged, protracted death by PPT on how to engineer slides and pairwise comparison charts and how to draw mechanical connections using dotted lines on a functional block diagram.