In order to look back on the past semester in some kind of organized manner, I'm going to split this post (and all following ones) up by class/activity. This post is about ModSim and ModCon.
Modeling and Simulation of the Physical World
ModSim was my favorite class this semester. I didn't actually learn any math or physics; I had a pretty good grasp of the theory needed for my projects when I came into the class. However, I didn't have experience with the process of modeling a system and then doing work with the model, and that process is the point of ModSim. I'm also much better at putting together and presenting posters than I was before the semester began. I have a good bit of experience with slide presentations, but I had only done one poster presentation and hadn't really known what I was doing in terms of poster layout or how to talk to someone about the poster. I got a lot of poster layout experience in ModSim, and after the video presentation for project 2 and presenting project 3 for the ModSim final and Expo, I'm comfortable talking about a poster.
As far as skills that are a little less broad, I can now code in Matlab, and I can use some Adobe products -- Illustrator, which I used to make graphs prettier and to draw diagrams to explain a system, and InDesign, which I used to format the posters. I wish I had done a little more coding on the first two projects, but not focusing on the code gave me a chance to get very good with poster layout and content.
I really liked the format of ModSim overall: three projects, done with three different partners, exploring three different types of systems, with each project less structured in terms of deliverables than the last. Along the way, we had individual assignments, diagnostics, to make sure we understood the models, physics, and Matlab that we needed in order to do the projects. We spent most of our time in studio working on the projects, but about once a week (less than that later in projects) we met in the auditorium to talk about the types of systems we were using -- what we needed to know for both the projects and the diagnostics. When we were in studio, the studio instructor and the two or three NINJAs assigned to the studio floated around, checking in with each group, answering any questions (or finding the right person to answer questions).
We got feedback in ModSim on posters and presentations, but it would have been helpful to get some feedback on intermediate deliverables in the first and second projects. During the second and third projects, I would have appreciated some NINJA hours that were presentation practice -- NINJA comments on earlier versions of the presentation and poster would have made final presentations a bit easier. The two biggest problems with ModSim this year, though, were how long we had for the second project (a month, and 90% of the class thought it felt rushed) and the website for submitting assignments (confusing and constantly changing, but the instructors have said they won't use it in the future).
ModSim had a wrap-up class period that consisted mainly of what I've talked about here: what we learned, what worked, what didn't, and what we as students could have done better. We started by filling out a written evaluation with questions about these, and then we talked about them as a group. I really appreciated that we were given the opportunity to give feedback within ModSim -- the questions made more sense for the course than did the generic course evaluation.
Modeling and Control
I don't have strong feelings about ModCon. It was a pattern: lecture, pre-lab, lab, lab report, repeat. Of all my classes, I put the least work into ModCon. There are a couple of labs I wish I had spent more time doing well, but most weeks I think the time I put into ModCon was appropriate. The background I had from Electric Circuits in high school was extremely helpful, especially near the beginning of the class. I had already learned at least the theory of everything that we did in the electrical domain.
The parts of ModCon that I most enjoyed were the lectures and labs that didn't just concern the electrical domain. We used lightbulbs (the filaments, really) as transducers between the electrical and thermal domains, and then to go between electrical and mechanical we used motors. My final project was also about a transducer, a water pump, going between the electrical and the fluid domains.
ModCon was a frustrating class for a lot of people. Spiral learning is generally promoted at Olin, and this shows in ModCon. There's a lot of background that we just didn't cover. For example, we used first and second order linear differential equations for everything, but we didn't actually solve the DEs. Oscar gave us the solutions, and then we checked that those solutions worked. We took some circuits and used them; understanding why they work comes later in the sequence of circuits courses. For people who always want an answer to "Why?" this was frustrating. For people who had almost no experience with circuits, class could get pretty confusing.
Lectures with Oscar were always fun, though, and everyone loves Oscar. ModCon experience varies a bit with NINJA, and I had a helpful and very mathematically minded NINJA who was good about getting our lab reports back to us in a timely manner. I did have Tuesday lab, which was always chaotic and bug-filled since we were the first ones to do each lab. After all those issues were ironed out, though, the labs were generally straight forward.
I'm not an Electrical and Computer Engineer (ECE), and if it weren't required I wouldn't take Real World Measurements (RWM, pronounced 'worm,' sometimes called ModCon 2) next semester, but if it's much like ModCon, then I'll end up enjoying it.
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