Mentoring For Mech Design 1

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The largest part of my job as a TA for Mech Design 1 is mentoring the students through their design projects. I am assigned a portion of the teams at the beginning of the semester and I am their first point of contact for anything from rule clarifications to grading questions to design questions. I also meet with these teams the week prior to each project testing to answer any questions and give any advice as they close in on the testing date. Occasionally it is necessary for the TA's to resolve conflicts within a team when its members don't feel the work is evenly distributed between them.

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To give some context of the scope of these projects see the pictures and video clip on this page. These are from one of the projects my team built when I took the class, and although the projects change each semester, this project is a good representative of the kind of problem that the projects pose to solve. The projects are often under 3 pounds, within 1.5 feet cubed, and typically deal with some assortment of sporting balls. In my case, ping pong and golf balls were sorted by color and type. The score was dependent on weight, size, and number of balls sorted.