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This was one of the most entertaining courses in the program. Our year, the project was to design an ROV that had to conform to certain size, depth, and performance specifications. Our group made a skookum little machine that looked great and performed well - it's too bad we lost any film/video of it (due to theft of a camera). Also, since we had to acknowledge that the machine was 'the property of UVic', we weren't allowed to keep it. Come to think of it, I still have some rather expensive parts that I want back... I know the actual project definition changes over the years. The deign project for the year after us was to make an ROV that could propel itself through the water WITHOUT PROPELLERS! The year before us, the class had to design an electronic device that could track the movement of a human's pupil and connect it to a visual output device - so that a paralyzed person would be able to spell out words simply by looking at a board with letters on it. (This project was a disaster, I understand, since the know-how needed for this task (taught in MECH 435 and MECH 455) was not really introduced until too late in the term.) As with other similar courses, there were progress, midterm, and final reports. The content for these reports was completely spelled out in the course handouts, so it was essentially following a recipe. If you use good grammar and make it look pretty you should get a good mark. There were two presentations - one progress (in front of the class) and one preliminary trial (in the McKinnon swimming pool). Nothing to sweat. There was no text book for this course, so what many students did was plug that 'saved' money into their machines. One group actually chipped in about $200 per member (4 members) and got private backing for several hundred more - but in the end they didn't succeed much better than other groups. Our group managed to scrounge material from the machine shop, and only had to buy a handful of components totaling less than $100 - and we were one of the top 2 or 3 groups (marks-wise). The only difficulties in this course arose from personality differences between members in our group - unavoidable at the best of times. But in my case, I had teamed with a couple of GPA-obsessed over-achievers, and three of the members did not speak English as their first language. But aside from having to show up for Sunday morning meetings and trying to assemble the reports into something understandable, I was still proud of the final product. I still have most of my course material (reports, drawings, etc.) which may serve as good samples. E-mail me and I'll send over what I have. |
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