At Maryland, all first year engineering students take an Introduction to Engineering Design class. Other schools may have a similar class, but the purpose of this course was to work through the engineering design process with a group of seven other students. The final goal was to design and build an over sand vehicle (OSV) that could autonomously navigate over sand and around rocky obstacles and reach a destination. At this destination, the OSV was supposed to perform a specified task, which varied by team. I was on the Chemical Neutralization Team, so our assignment was to make our OSV navigate to a pool of water, measure the pH of the pool, collect a sample, and neutralize the pH by adding washing soda and/or vinegar to the water. Arduino was the coding program that we used and various materials and motors were assembled to construct the OSV. Although this sounds like a lot to do in one semester, and it is, the main purpose of this class was to go through the design process, not necessarily to have a perfect product at the end.
At first this class was overwhelming because I had never coded before and I did not know how to build a vehicle that could actually move. However, the design and teamwork skills that I learned through ACE helped me in this class. Through ACE, I learned to use a step-by-step, systematic approach when solving engineering problems, which is something I applied in this design class. I also learned the importance of splitting up tasks between team members at ACE, which is also something that was necessary in this class.
At the end of the semester, when we were supposed to be finishing up our OSV, my team faced many engineering failures, which I can't help but laugh about now. The night before the competition, two of our drive motors broke... This was probably caused by faulty calculations, but we did not have extra motors and we had to make some quick changes to even have a moving OSV to put on the sand the next day. In the end, everything did not go as planned, but we learned a lot through the process.
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