Assignment for Monday, 28 April, 2008

Pneumatics Engineering Project

The pneumatic systems project is a new concept I am working up.  As a result, I am concurrently creating the documentation for the project.  I can point you to a few resources that will give you a good idea of the criteria that you will be scored by.

Proposal/Presentation Rubric
Robot Rubric
The rubric links should bring you to a rubric for an automated pesticide sprayer project.  While these guidelines are specific to that project, it should be rather simple to extrapolate these ideas to a more open-ended project like the one you are currently involved in.

Documentation
Don't forget to document everything.  The link above gives you a consolidated location for the types of documents that you should be creating.  For more professional documents, try a little word processing.

Task Management
Check out the links on the far right of this page about team structure.  Some of it is touchy-feely, hippy stuff, but some of it might help you come up with ideas about how to give people smaller assignments that end up helping you complete the big assignment.

Take your project and break it down into smaller components using a PERT chart or some similar process.  This might help you find small assignments that can be knocked out by individuals or smaller sub-groups.  It might just also help you finish all of this stuff by Friday!

Friday, April 25 Assignment Directions
This is not just a build and present project.  You actually have to do some work.  But it's easy stuff, it just takes a little bit of time to do it.  You have four people on your team, it shouldn't be much for each of you if it gets split up fairly well.

This is a good place to start for a general overview of the type of work we are doing for this project.

You will be creating an engineering design notebook.  Here are the general guidelines for your notebook.  I expect to have a grading rubric sometime early next week.

Your first task is to give the people on the team some actual responsibility.  No more of this ambiguous "everyone is responsible" nonsense.  That hasn't worked for anyone and there are plenty of wise sayings about other's experiences with similar management schemes.

Select a project manager.  This is the person that I can go to for status updates on your team's progress.  This is also the person that I will go to in order to schedule one or two short meetings with during class next week.  This should be a good "task-master" type person that isn't afraid to make sure that others in the group are on top of getting their portion of the work done.  This doesn't mean that this person isn't helping out with the work!

Once you have planned out most of the project, start divvying out the tasks to team members.  You might volunteer to do the ones that you really want to do, and then split up some of the remaining "less-desirable" tasks.  Come up with an appropriate title for your position/job(s).

At the end of the week, you will be submitting an engineering notebook and presenting your product in a final design review format.  More details about the presentation will be delivered next week.

If you need some guidance on getting started with your team's project management, check out the resources located at the following link.  This page will help you out with a significant chunk of the documentation for the notebook.
Project Management Process

Finally for today, become familiar with some of the other aspects of the notebook using the resources at the following link.
Engineering Process