Professor
Daniel Yang
1 of 1
Most Helpful Review
Good professor, though a lot of the class seemed to be review from kinematics, just with more emphasis on linkages. A note on the project: I felt that due to the CS requirement for this class, we were expected to write a program to solve it. The teacher and TA's also made this seem to be the case. However, if you do write a program, it will take way too long to solve for an answer, because there are too many variables. I wrote mine in simple fashion (it's fairly straightforward once you have the equations), and you could probably achieve more efficiency if you solve recursively somehow, however, I felt that it was simply too time intensive to do so. Especially since CS31 is a pretty basic course, and methods of approaching the project aren't discussed much in class. It's very frustrating if you do try to write a program, as you can't really tell how close you are to a solution, either, you just have to wait for it to continue running until done. There are a few other methods for solving the project, which he does discuss in class. I ended up solving it over the course of a night using guess and check, whereas I had had my program running (with intermittent restarts to address bugs) for almost a week on two computers. I was very frustrated at starting a week early, only to end up figuring out I wasted my time and then having to stay up all night the day before it was due. I mentioned to the professor that I thought he should tell students that it can take a long time to solve computationally, because it really does waste a lot of time, but I thought I'd say that here, as well. That was how things worked out for me, at least.
Good professor, though a lot of the class seemed to be review from kinematics, just with more emphasis on linkages. A note on the project: I felt that due to the CS requirement for this class, we were expected to write a program to solve it. The teacher and TA's also made this seem to be the case. However, if you do write a program, it will take way too long to solve for an answer, because there are too many variables. I wrote mine in simple fashion (it's fairly straightforward once you have the equations), and you could probably achieve more efficiency if you solve recursively somehow, however, I felt that it was simply too time intensive to do so. Especially since CS31 is a pretty basic course, and methods of approaching the project aren't discussed much in class. It's very frustrating if you do try to write a program, as you can't really tell how close you are to a solution, either, you just have to wait for it to continue running until done. There are a few other methods for solving the project, which he does discuss in class. I ended up solving it over the course of a night using guess and check, whereas I had had my program running (with intermittent restarts to address bugs) for almost a week on two computers. I was very frustrated at starting a week early, only to end up figuring out I wasted my time and then having to stay up all night the day before it was due. I mentioned to the professor that I thought he should tell students that it can take a long time to solve computationally, because it really does waste a lot of time, but I thought I'd say that here, as well. That was how things worked out for me, at least.
AD
1 of 1
