While being a Student at SJSU I have been able to be part of many interesting and educational engineering projects such as an automatic bicycle derailleur, PID controlled Ping Pong ball levitator, SAE mini Baja vehicle, and CNC plywood furniture. My success is in most contributed to having competent teammates, and giving enough time to finish the project. Failures have been mostly due to rushing results and making mistakes.
The Ping pong ball levitator was one project that was ,unfortunately, a failure. My group did not work well together and waited far too long to begin the project. The due date came up fast, and a group member made make a silly mistake the ultimately burnt out the fans that were used to control the levitation and put the project way behind. We did not meet regularly enough to ensure that sufficient progress was taking place, and was far too late when we took the time to assess.
In order to be successful on this project, I am planning on starting early, and working consistently. I also believe it is important to have group members meet weekly in order to go over progress, and shift member attention and energy around accordingly. Small problems can ultimately overtake a project and be its downfall. My goal is to prevent this from happening
Another issue I experienced in previous projects were not having enough heads for the workload. There were just too few students working on the project in order to do all the tasks that it required. This stressed out the few members that were working on it, and eventually fewer and fewer were consistently working on the project. By the end of the semester, there were only one or two that were working on it.
I am looking forward to this project, because of the organization that is going into it. There are enough competent individuals part of this group that good things can be done. As long as we work hard, and throw ourselves into this project it can't be predicted what we can do. I am looking forward to being part of this project, and seeing cool things be made.
