A
The team made excellent progress designing a circuit board. They had no basis or experience in this from the major, which is quite astonishing / unsat about the major. They had to learn this from a Drone Racing Team 2/C who worked independently to learn how to design circuits boards!
Ms Pak has already worked one term on this topic in EW496 and due to Covid and USNA purchasing still has not gotten a roach or a COTS backpack to work with. This is not on her; this is something else unsat about what we are (not) providing.
Pak and Pritchard contacted me early and we did the report entirely in Latex which made collaboration and editing much simpler. I wish all my students had done this, it saves a ton of time dealing with poorly formatted docx from templates. I direct all my 402/404 students to 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.
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 sticking wires in roaches 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 class focus on designing a single widget is a poor fit for other things the student may have to design. I have been outspoken about this in the context of scientific research. Originally the hope was for Ms Pak to actually design experiments and answer neuromechanics questions aimed at publishing biology research. 401 precludes this and as a result they pivoted to designing the rig as a widget for a lab exercise. However, because 401 required someone else to be the customer, the lab exercise they were initially designing for assumed a cookie-cutter engineering lab where people simply run through the script and get the answer. My intent was for any exercise to work like IB135L where they learn a technique and then use it to answer their own science questions, forming testable hypotheses and designing experiments to get answers. USNA has no biology department, and does not teach this type of thinking well anywhere. This is astounding considering we are in the middle of a global security situation caused by a pandemic.
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. This department does not appreciate how real Navy acquisition professionals work (e.g. Naval Reactors, or the wider Naval Sea Systems Command) but their methods work. When they rename the building for a WRCE prof I will be happy to switch over but last I checked it's still Rickover Hall.
- Consideration of 3 references as some magic number with more bad
- "Statistical significance" not understood (not on the team, it's on us!)
- Worries about parts list and budget in which students did not learn how to use margin or estimate or scale; or how to relate budget and hours effort in a WBS.
- All criteria graded 0-4 with no actual test data or raw numerics
- Standards and specifications mention bluetooth and wifi just because. What value is added by this section?
- Fake numbers in budget directed by rubric and templates
- During design presentations, blind use of an example presentation (even including nicknames for team members just because a team did that before)
- Silly EW401 format mechanical drawing that isn't actually a mechanical drawing
- Software structure - it is strange that highly capable seniors in our major do not have enough background to get into how the backpack may interface with offboard computer via ROS, offboard machine vision, etc.
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 accidental. I think the team did OUTSTANDING work but we are not giving them enough tools tosucceed, and the design of 401 and the capstone experience is hampering them.
Ms Pak is a highly capable engineer and future submarine officer but during design of the board she claimed "I don't really know how to read schematics." We are not doing our jobs if this is the case. The "functional block diagrams" in 401 fail - they are focused on style and whether to use dotted or dashed lines for mechanical connection versus power and ground when we are not helping our students learn how to read these things.