ENGR20003: Engineering Materials

MAST style assignment - 15%, 1 Group Report - 15%, 50 minute MST - 10%, 2 hour exam - 60%

This is a subject that covers a fairly basic range of engineering materials in fairly minimal detail. Overall, it has generally been considered an easy H1 by past students, but most (including me) seemed to find this year's exam a bit harder than years past. That said, I got a H1.

Elisa is the unofficial subject coordinator for Eng Mat. She gives the majority of the lectures and outlines the assignment and tutorial schedule. She is a very good lecturer and excellent at answering questions and visualising her explanations with diagrams. She is also extremely quick (to the point of creepiness) to answer emails.

The lecture material is generally interesting and will be familiar to anyone who has completed Constructing Environments. There are separate sections on steel, timber, concrete and masonry and essentially an extended aside on Materials Chemistry run by George Franks as well as an Eng Mechanics refresher on elementary stress and strain. All of these lectures are pretty good and explained well, but the sequence in which they are presented jumbles up the content. i.e. because of the imbalanced lecture lengths (a 2 hour and a 1 hour), you will have a lecture of a completely different subject in between two lectures on the same subject. e.g:

• Mon Week 3 - Stress and Strain
• Tues Week 3 - Materials chemistry pt. 1
• Mon Week 4 - Steel pt. 1
• Tues Week 4 - Materials chemistry pt. 2

This disjointed method of presenting content somewhat inhibits a coherent and intuitive understanding.

However, the worst part of this subject is by far the tutorials. I don't know if it was only my tutor, but he would literally talk for an hour and do any calculations on the board with little attempt to engage with the students. Eventually I decided I could spend that hour far more productively and stopped showing up. Usually I'm not the sort of student that skips tutes, but this one was so useless and attendance wasn't even marked. None of the content is complicated enough to cause any issues by skipping these, and extensive solutions to all tute questions are provided anyway.

Assessment
MST focusses on the literally the first two weeks of lectures on elementary stress and strain and Mohr's circles. This should be an easy H1 for anyone who had been paying attention, especially those that had come across this already in Eng Mech.

The first assignment was essentially a maths style assignment about materials chemistry. George goes over examples of each of the questions his series of lectures so it is another easy H1.

The second assignment is a 10 page optional group report (i.e. you can do it individually or in a three man (yes man; this is engineering) group of your choosing) that involves observations, structural sketches and calculations of loads acting on a building on campus. This takes a bit of time but is actually and pretty interesting and enjoyable project.

The exam is pretty easy as well, though a few random questions came up that I wasn't quite prepared for and it seemed they made a conscious effort to make it more difficult than years past (where most would reportedly leave with 30-60 mins to go).

Another complaint of this subject is the lack of urgency in timely marking and giving feedback. MST and assignment results consistently took ages to be returned.
Overall, this is a somewhat interesting subject that is well lectured and well resourced, and it should be an easy one for any engineering major.

Yes, with screen capture

Elisa Lumantarna and several other guest lecturers

Several.

Yes, several with solutions provided

3.25 out of 5

There are several prescribed, but none are necessary

1x 2 hours lecture, 1 x 1 hour lecture, 1 x 1 hour tute

Sem 2, 2013

H1