ENG1002: Engineering Design: Cleaner, Safer, Smarter

Project 1 - 15%
Report on Fuel Efficiency and Sustainability

Project 2 - 15%
Build an LED lamp and a design report

Lecture Attendance - 5%
Lecture attendance was recorded by answering questions using a web app accessible with smart phones. You had to answer 80% of the questions to get the mark. Your answers do not have to be correct to get the mark.

Pre-lecture and pre-practical quizzes - 25%
You had to do 2 quizzes each week. I found some of the pre-practical quizzes quite challenging which makes sense because they were given after the lectures.

Exam - 40%
Split relatively evenly between chemical, materials and electrical engineering.

Coming out of ENG1001 from first semester I had high expectations for ENG1002. The 2 hour "workshops" were nothing like 1001's but instead were just an ordinary lecture with the occasional clicker question. I found that because they were 2 hours it was quite hard to get through. Furthermore, the whole unit's theme is light blubs, which frankly is not something that interesting at all.
Overall, I found that the unit's content could have been potentially more interesting but was presented badly resulting in a poor experience.

Meng Wei, Christopher Hutchison and Jonathan Li

Yes, one past exam from S1 2015 with answers but no worked solutions

1 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

There might be recommended textbooks but I didn't look at them.

1 x 2hr lecture and 1 x 3hr practical

S2 2015

86

10% - Pre-lecture Quizzes: It wasn’t too difficult to get all the marks for the pre-lecture quizzes because you got more than one attempt and you got answers from the previous attempts. Even if you didn’t have an idea of the concepts behind it (like with some of the electrical stuff), you could still find a way to get to the answer. The pre-lecture quizzes do get harder as the semester progresses though.

15% - Project 1: Report on Fuel Sustainability and Efficiency when used in lamps. We tested different fuels (kerosene, butanol, methylated spirits etc.) in a fuel lamp and measured the light output as well as fuel consumption over a time interval. Writing this report and doing the tasks during the practical was a little dry and repetitive.

15% - Project 2: Building an LED lamp and writing a design report. All the parts for building an LED lamp were given to us except the frame (which we had to come up with) and we were marked based on it fulfilling certain criteria such as uniform light intensity, sturdiness, power drawn etc. It took a really long time to get this working and I did not expect to be working up until 10pm on the lamp in the last week. Getting the lamp working was incredibly satisfying and it was fun working with my teammates.

5% - Lecture Participation: There’s a lecture response system called Melts which they use so you can answer questions during lectures. Apparently if you answered 80%+ of the questions you would have “participated” and you’ll get all of these marks. To be honest, I don’t think they really asked that many questions during lectures. Also, it doesn’t matter if you’re incorrect though it’s just the participation that matters.

15% - Pre-practical quizzes + other quizzes: These pre-practical quizzes were much harder than the pre-lecture quizzes as they were designed to be completed after the lectures. They started appearing once we hit electrical and featured some fancy circuit questions. Still, because the solutions to the first attempt were given, it wasn’t hard to get most of the marks.

40% - Exam: Exam is split into 3 sections with around a 1/3 weighting for each section. The sections are Chemical, Electrical and Materials. The hardest topic by far was electrical engineering as it had some unexpected questions, but the exam other than that wasn’t too bad. The materials section felt very similar to the weekly problem sheets which we received. The exam is a hurdle requiring 45% to pass the unit.

This was a brand new unit for all first year engineering students starting in 2015. It aimed to combine 3 previous first year engineering units, and I think they did a really good job. Of course we weren’t able to get into as much detail as each of the three, but I still felt I learnt quite a lot about each discipline. Chemical Engineering was covered in weeks 1-4, Materials in weeks 6-8 and Electrical in Week 5, 9-10.

The lectures were quite interesting, and all of the lecturers really made the effort to answer questions. Chris Hutchison’s lecturing was extremely clear and interesting – he made materials engineering sound extremely awesome with his examples and explanations.

This unit focuses hugely on teamwork. You do a Belbon quiz to work out your team personality attributes and then you’re apparently grouped up to make the best team. I think it really worked out well in this unit. My team was great and I think that’s a huge part of why I rated this unit so high. Even if the content was really hard and confusing, my prac team just had fun messing around, Teams are also huge when it comes to the projects. Project 1 and 2 are team based, and in Project 2 you see your teammates a lot. On that night I mentioned previously, I spent around 7 hours with my team working on the LED lamp. It was great that my team were all motivated and willing to get it done. One of my other friends from a different practical session was there alone because all his teammates were unmotivated – would’ve been really tough for him.

There's also peer assessment using CATME on top of the Belbon quiz. After each assignment, you got to rate each of your teammates in different areas based on how you believe they contributed to the team. They would also do the same for you. This would scale marks up or down. The team members who were highly rated would get a scaling upwards, and lower rated team members would be scaled down. I don't think there's a limit to how low you can be scaled down - one of my friends had a terrible teammate who got voted down a lot resulting in his marks being multiplied by 0.6-0.7. I think CATME gives everyone added incentive to actually contribute to the team and it gives teammates a good way of recognising who put in a lot of effort and those who didn't do so much.

My main issue with the course is the chemical engineering at the start. I didn’t do VCE chemistry… the last time I did chemistry before this year was back in Year 9. So jumping into chemical engineering straight away was really tough – I was doing Foundation Chemistry (ENG1070) at the same time but topics just came together out of order and I learnt tough things in ENG1002 before I learnt them in Foundation Chemistry. Odd. So if you haven’t done Chemistry it might be better to do ENG1001 in first semester then ENG1002 in second semester once you’ve done the foundation unit.

I’d say don’t leave things too late in this unit. Unlike ENG1001, the problem sheets are not compulsory, so there’s not much incentive for doing them (unless you really want to learn). So I ended up leaving most of the problem sheets until late in the semester and ended up playing catch up with the earlier content – especially chemistry since I barely understood it the first time around.

Other than that, I think it was a great move by the Engineering faculty. I’m not a big fan of chemistry and I have a good idea of the engineering major I want to do. This unit allowed me to just get a glimpse of three of the engineering discipliens without having to do an entire unit like in previous years.

Meng Wei, Christopher Hutchison, Jonathan Li

Nope! Brand new unit. However you can do some questions from previous past exams which made up this unit (ENG1010, ENG1030, and ENG1050).

4/5

Yep, with screen capture. Although in earlier weeks there are physical items brought into lectures by the lecturer which make it interesting. Also remember there is a participation mark!

1x2hr lecture, 1x3hr practical

2015, S1

98 HD