During this semester, I took EGR100, which is the first and most general engineering course for all engineers. This class is broken down into 2 projects that are completely hands-on experience. For each project, we are broken up into groups of 4.
The first project is to build a robot out of a lego NXT kit. The robot has to be able to follow a black line, pick up a ball, then continue along the black line until it reaches a stand that it has to drop the ball into. This sounds very complicated, and it was for pretty much the entire project. The difficult part was not building the robot, that was very easy just like building legos. Programming the robot was not easy at all. The robot works through a series of if/then commands; this means "if the robot senses the ball in front of it, then it will raise the claw". A series of commands like this were programmed so that the robot did what we wanted it to do when a certain condition was met.
This is a picture of my group's final robot. After countless hours of work, we finally got it to do everything we wanted and we got an A on the project. This was an experience different from any other that I've had in a classroom. We had to do hands-on work and perform tasks that real engineers do on a daily basis. This was not easy and I can't say I enjoyed it, but it was definitely a good experience.
Do you think this kind of class should be required for all engineers? Or just ones going into a programming/computer kind of engineering? Is this kind of programming required for all fields of engineering?
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