This was a great class! Definitely the kind of class that you get out of it what you put into it. Lectures are very engaging-- lots of participation opportunities (participation is extra credit btw) so if you're like me and you enjoy active learning rather than dry lectures, this is a good class. The professor really likes space and robots, which is great, because so do I! Many, if not most, lecture & hw problems have something to do with space, which is AMAZING. Also, there are no longer any MATLAB assignments! Just week-long HW's and quizzes-- HW tests your calculation skills, while quizzes test your ability to understand and explain concepts clearly, and derive equations. The class is definitely graded leniently, but it's also genuinely informative.
(Btw, if you take this class, heads up that the professor uses a bar over a character to indicate a vector, rather than an arrow over that vector.)
Overall, would definitely recommend this professor, especially if you're a space/robot nerd who likes engaging lectures.

It's Week 9 of Spring Quarter 2021 and nothing is going to change between now and the end of the quarter, so I might as well write a review.

Please Do Not Take This Class if you want to learn about dynamics. All the lectures are useless and are filled with derivations that are often very difficult to follow. The lectures lack structure, and the notes are often a jumble of equations and random shapes. Davoyan himself is a nice guy but doesn't seem to care about teaching and it's obvious he puts in minimal effort into the class. The homeworks are "easy" but only because close to identical questions are solved during discussions, and the quizzes are basically the homework questions with slightly different numbers. This means you could do very well in this class but come out of it not understanding a single thing about dynamics.

The lectures are uninspiring, the homeworks and exams are a joke, and I can safely say I have not learned a single thing from taking 102 with Davoyan. And judging from the class GroupMe, I know many others feel the same way.

tl;dr - don't take this class

DISCLAIMER: I took this class during Rona Szn so formatting could be very different for in person.

Davoyan is getting a lot of hate from this quarter but I didn't think he was that bad. The format of the class for this rona quarter was 20% MT1, 20% MT2, 20% Final Exam, 40% Homework (there were two types of homework.)

Lectures were not helpful at all, I didn't go after the couple of weeks but the material is heavily based off of 1A knowledge so using google and the textbook I was able to mostly teach myself what I needed to know.

The midterms were kind of easy cause they were half problems directly from the textbook and the other half was super open ended that he came up with himself. Since each test was only 20% of your grade, we had a whole week to do it (he even said you could google stuff if you needed help,) and the test was worth 110%, it was super low stress.

The homework was divided into two types, Type 1 which were just problems directly from the textbook (all on Slader) and Type 2. A lot of people didn't enjoy the Type 2 homeworks but I thought it was pretty interesting. There were only about 5 of the Type 2 assignments and half of those required MATLAB. It wasn't anything too hard, just plotting equations and derivatives of equations, I had zero MATLAB knowledge but using YouTube it wasn't even that bad. There was one MATLAB problem which no one really knew how to do, but when it comes down to it that problem was worth at most 0.5% of your grade so there was no point stressing about it. The majority of the Type 2 homework problems was just reading an article or watching a YouTube video and writing down interesting things.

The final was only one problem and we had a week to do it, but it was essentially using everything we learned to talk through how one would plot the landing of a Falcon 9 booster. Personally I though this was sick and an awesome way to test our knowledge, but a lot of people didn't like it.

Professor Davoyan seemed like a cool dude to me but didn't have the best social cues so I guess might have come across as rude. Honestly I would recommend this class cause I thought it was a refreshing approach on engineering classes that emphasized being independent and developing engineering skills on your own.

TL;DR: I wouldn't take this class if you prefer a typical class experience where you just need equations to get by, but if you want to be more independent and develop real engineering thinking, would highly recommend.

you have to learn MATLAB in your own time in this class. You have teach yourself. The homework assignments in MATLAB were very unclear. The midterms and final questions were also unclear. Students are engineers, but they should not be expected to solve major engineering problems yet. It is ridiculous to put a HUGE OPEN-ENDED PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING QUESTION AS THE FINAL. Not accomodating of the difficult times.

Maybe the least amount of effort I've put into a class to get an A. Optional homework, tons of extra credit, and take-home week long tests.

Davoyan's lectures were somewhat helpful but just very boring. His tests and quizzes were all take home with like 5ish days to work on them and they weren't super difficult either.

Looking at the previous reviews, I can say Davoyan definitely took these complaints to heart. He literally said at the beginning of the quarter that some students had complained about the derivations before so I'm sure he's heard and addressed everything else past reviews have mentioned. The lectures were pretty engaging with plenty of real world examples. He even brought in his son's toy robot arm a few times, which was pretty funny. Tests were... almost too easy to be completely honest. Given the reputation this topic has at other schools, I definitely feel like I did not struggle enough in this class, which does sound a bit weird to type. I still do think I learned something useful though.

DO NOT take this professor if you want to learn about Dynamics. Christ this person gave me an aneurysm. No idea how I even passed this class. Lectures are structured where he just derives formulas in the most convoluted way possible, and does the simplest of examples, meanwhile the final was a complete disaster, it wasn't at all structured like the homework assignments. For this quarter, we only had three quizzes and one final, no midterms; three quizzes were fair but the final was complete bull.

Week seven was when I realized that reading the textbook straight up would be easier than watching his lectures, and it was too late to get back the missing six weeks of lecture that I did not understand anything.

Professor Davoyan was a very strong professor. This class was taken online during COVID-19 so the class formatting may have been slightly different. He was very forgiving to us when it came to the midterms and the final. He took into consideration our time and our online situation and gave us a little over a week to do each exam. His exams were very fair, there was nothing that we couldn't answer and nothing that was a shock on the exam. He was a very strong lecturer, even on the online format, and although I read the textbook to gain a deeper understanding, even if you didn't read the textbook at all his lectures were engaging and gave you all the information you needed. He helped us to understand things conceptually on top of mathematically. The course itself is VERY DIFFICULT if you're not comfortable with rotational motion already, but he helped to alleviate some of the load. Some people are complaining about needing to know MATLAB and needing to teach yourself MATLAB, while it is true that we needed it for a few homeworks in the beginning of the quarter, it wasn't anything that took a crazy amount of time to learn, and was only basic things like graphing and writing and solving equations. I had no prior MATLAB experience and these homeworks were not that much. His grading scheme was very fair (it was split evenly across homework, the midterms, and the final). If the midterms were hard, you had the final to help, if the final was hard, your homework balanced it. I was never worried about grades in this class because I was doing well enough on the homeworks and did well enough on the midterms (which he offered extra credit on) thanks to how fair they were.

Disclaimer: I took this class online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I'm not sure if this class was really like Physics 1A/AP Physics 1, or it was just taught that way, but that's how it came out to be. The lectures were pretty dry, and this class was pretty formulaic as a whole. If you care to learn more about the conceptual side, it'll be there for you, but if not, you can definitely get by in the class by just knowing the equations. Prof. Davoyan's grading scheme is really great, as everything is worth 20%, and he also gives extra credit on all of his exams.