Your project
| Site: | learnonline |
| Course: | Mechanical Engineering Practice resources |
| Book: | Your project |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Tuesday, 16 July 2024, 7:27 PM |
Description
Your project
Table of contents
- Working in teams and the Belbin team roles
- Project tasks and how to schedule them
- Making your project meetings worthwhile
- WHS and producing risk assessments
- How to apply WHS standards in your project
- Ideas for your design
- Brainstorming your ideas
- GANTT Charts
- Hints and ideas for materials and parts
- Working with technical staff
- Project documentation
- Electronics software and hardware
Working in teams, and the Belbin team roles
Much of your work in this course is as a group, and it is critical that you can work effectively as a team right from the start.
In this video, Michael talks about the challenges and processes involved in making your group work really effective.
As you watch, think about the following questions:
What team role do you think that you fit best: organiser, motivator, pusher, soldier, gatherer, listener, completer, specialist, or evaluator?
How would you deal with team members who you think are not contributing or not participating effectively?
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The design and build assessment task for this course is quite a large task, and will need to be divided up into a number of smaller tasks, complete with timelines, in order to produce a working device before the final deadline.
Michael talks here about the type of sub-tasks you or your group will need to complete for the project, and how to effectively allocate time frames to each task.
What do you think are usually the main obstacles to a student or a student group staying on schedule?
What are some simple techniques you might be able to use to overcome each of these obstacles?
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Download the slides for this video (920 KB), or the slides for any of the other videos on 'Your project' Managing your project meetings and making them worthwhile
We've all been in project and group meetings which, looking back, were total wastes of time, for a number of different reasons.
Michael gives some hints here on how to keep your group project meetings on track and worthwhile.
As you watch, think about the following questions:
Can your group meet face to face or do meetings have to be online?
If online, what tools are the best for this (Skype, etc)?
How often should the team meet?
Who is going to keep the records of what happened and what was decided?
How will you deal with team members who are not turning up?
Note that you will have to keep a log book of every session in which you complete any work for this project, so you will need to keep records of what happened in each session.
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You will probably need to produce a risk assessment as part of your project documentation, so this session will introduce you to the format and content for the type of assessment which is expected.
What are the basic aims and requirements of any risk assessment?
What do you think will be the principle risks inherent in your project work?
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In this lecture, Mr Jim Toshach, a WHS manager, talks about examples of actually applying safety considerations in the design and build and testing of your device.
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Note that there are no slides for this video.
Ideas for your design
This lecture actually applies the theory of your project work to reality - it makes the whole task 'real'.
In this lecture, Don Joseph, the leader of the winning design group in 2014, talks about how his group got started in their project work, and gives ideas and hints for overcoming technical challenges.
As you watch, consider how to apply Don's experience to your own project work, to produce a more efficient result. What lessons can you take away here?
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So you have a copy of the project requirements, and the list of specifications, but your design right now is a piece of blank paper ... where do you start?
Uddin talks here about how to brainstorm different aspects of the design, just to get started.
Bearing in mind the project brief for the mechanical device in this unit, try to come up with a couple of ideas (no matter how wacky they might seem!) each for:
System for the device
Materials for the device
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In an earlier video, Michael talked about how to decide on and schedule project tasks, and introduced GANTT charts. In this video, he discusses GANTT charts further and worked through a chart for an example project. You may need to produce a GANTT chart as part of the documentation for your project.
The main two limitations of GANTT charts are:
They rely on an effective work breakdown structure having been completed
They won't work properly if you don't update them regularly with any delays in the project timing.
Can you think of any other potential problems that could arise if you or your group are not using the GANTT charts properly?
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This video gives you some ideas for materials and parts which are available at the university for you to use (mainly for borrowing only).
Note that all of this information may not be applicable every year.
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If you are working on your project build on campus, you will probably need to seek the help of the laboratory technical staff, both for the electrical and mechanical labs. This lecture will give you some hints about the most effective ways to approach and work with these people, to get the best result for your project.
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As part of your final submission for the design and build project, you will almost certainly need to produce detailed project documentation.
In this lecture, Michael talks about how to structure your reports so that they make sense. He also discusses the sections which you must include, such as references, drawings, and so on.
In the lecture, Mike talks about marking rubrics as being very important sources of information for your group when producing the reports. What are marking rubrics and how can they help you to achieve good marks for your project documentation?
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Although we tend to classify engineers into different specialisations (such as mechanical, electrical, civil, etc), the reality is that there are very few mechanical projects these days which don't include any electronics.
Your device will need to use electronic software and hardware for its operation. In these two videos, Michael talks about the best types to use, and how to make the most of them.
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Electronics hardware
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