ENGR 1624

Loved this class with Dart! He was a super chill professor, and his TA's were great!

The projects were a little time consuming, but still mostly fun. His TA's were always available, and I would take another class with Prof. Dart if I could! #tCFfall2021

(Hated the lab portion with Ann Reimers tho. That was a complete waste of time unfortunately.)

I took this course online and would say it is most likely A LOT better in person. There were no group projects and the majority of "hands-on" work was done online. I would note that the schedule of the semester changed a lot throughout the semester. The course started out kinda difficult for me but it got a lot easier as the semester progressed. In the beginning, you work with CAD(Computer-Aided Design), mainly Solidworks, which is basically 3D modeling. The worst part of the CAD portion of the semester was watching multiple lessons and videos on CAD per week, which took quite a long time as the videos are pretty dense with content. Furthermore, the quizzes on Solidworks tested you on the videos thoroughly with multiple-choice questions. Professor Dart helps us a lot with these quizzes by making them open note and gave us all the questions for the first two quizzes. Dart recommended splitting up the videos day by day so you don't overwhelm yourself before the quiz. He assigns us new homework on Monday, reviews for the quiz with the class on Friday, and releases the quiz over the weekend, which gives you ample time to tackle the videos. He also assigns us a 3D modeling assignment each week to do which was kind of interesting. It can range from modeling a ring to a camera mount. I found some of these assignments kind of difficult, but the TA's will help you A LOT with the homework. We also got to make a cantilever and applied as much force as possible until it snapped which was cool. Overall, this portion of the semester was taught pretty in-depth, and you become a pro at Solidworks. I personally didn't like it that much because I'm more of a CS or CPE guy, but there are other people from my class who enjoyed it a lot. This really helps you out if you ever consider fields such as mechanical, aerospace, civil, and even biomedical. The second portion of the semester is pretty much circuits and coding. I personally found this part underwhelming. You receive an electronics kit that has a bunch of electronic devices and parts such as resistors, photoresistors, LEDs, buzzers, motors, and much more. You basically read this book that teaches you how to make certain projects with an Arduino. The downside is that it just feels like you are mindlessly following the book and connecting wires to the breadboard without knowing why you are connecting them a certain way. It also doesn't help that the code is preloaded so you don't really have to program anything. To be honest, I did not learn that much from this portion as the content assigned was very shallow. However, I wouldn't say that's a bad thing considering the pace of the semester. Professor Dart did assign less homework during this portion and made the quizzes even easier by allowing unlimited submissions, allowing unlimited time, and making the quizzes shorter. The final portion of the semester is pretty much the final project. He cut a lot of tests including our final exam which was great. For the final project, you pretty much combine CAD, circuits, and programming together to make whatever you want as long as can be carried with one/two hands and has two moving parts. This will vary in difficulty depending on what you choose but try to make it simple.

Overall, I think Dart is a pretty good professor. While you might be receiving more work than your peers with other professors, it is definitely worthwhile. You learn a lot more from this class compared to other professors and pretty much pickup up very strong fundamentals of engineering which could possibly help you land an early internship. Even though this class was difficult at times, it's pretty easy to get an A. He is a very easy grader and makes the workload progressively less/easier. If you are pretty undecided with your major first semester, I would recommend a different professor. Dart really only covers about 3 fields of engineering (ME, EE, and CS) but with more depth. The TA's are a godsend and will literally help you out with anything. Professor Dart was also pretty accommodating as he understood the circumstances of this semester. He's a pretty chill and fun professor and will definitely make you a better engineer.