Lectures: completed recorded and asynchronous; fairly straightforward, does some good examples, although he talks a bit repetitive at times

Discussions: a bit repetitive, but basically guides you into the weekly homework

Labs: TA helps with writing a pseudo-code for the homework, which is really nice

Quizzes: one a week; pretty straightforward questions, basically directly derived from lectures; some weird wordings but generally okay

Overall: I knew a little bit of Python coding going in and it really helped. If you know a bit of coding going in, then this will be fairly easy. If not, then the TA labs will be a really good resource.

Class felt super disorganized, I often had very little idea on exactly what the expectations were for each assignment. I also generally just felt a lack of clear communication between the professor and TA. The grading is relatively lenient, though, so that makes up for not knowing what is even expected. I would also come into this class with a group prepared for the final project, because if you don't have one they don't even prompt you to start communicating with your group, and there isn't any class time dedicated to that, you just have to figure it out.

This class is easy and all but it's mildly annoying. Lectures are clear but they are drawn out and remedial. Homework is mostly busy work where they go for quantity over quality of questions. It'll ask for like 15 part drawings or 40 questions asking you to look up values from a table. It's nice to have a final project instead of exams, but the report is way longer than it needs to be. It's cool that we're 3D printing. I'd recommend attending nothing and just looking at lecture slides to do all the assignments. Start the project as early as you can, but don't be worried by his constant emails. You can start in week 9 or 10 and be fine, just be aware that it will take multiple prints to get everything to work how you want.

If you are a part of an engineering club that uses CAD, you will probably be a little bored in this class. If you are not and have no CAD experience, it will probably be a bit confusing at first. This class was a bit disorganized and the professor was hard to reach. I personally relied on the TA to clarify things, but it seemed like the TA and the Professor didn't communicate much. That being said, as long as you do your work, which can be a lot at times, you will do well in this class.

I took this class online asynchronous. We had 6 HW assignments, 8 quizzes, and a final project (2 weeks to complete). Although a lot of the homework assignments seemed confusing at first glance, Professor Gao was very helpful during office hours with answering questions as well as checking over people's code. Although I'm not particularly good at coding, the professor's (and TA's!) feedback made the assignments much easier. For each assignment, we had to submit both the code and a report. I found the reports very tedious but not difficult. Overall, this class was pretty decent, although I'm not sure I would have liked it as much if it were in-person.

Class was pretty easy. Weekly assignments and homework were time consuming but they graded very leniently. Final project was a nightmare because it was so much work. If you had any CAD experience from any engineering clubs the labs should we easy.

Prof Gao was great -- super, super helpful and very understanding. The class taught SolidWorks extremely well -- which is very helpful as a MechE student if you're looking for research or an internship. The group project was a nightmare (mostly because of my group), but they grade everything very nicely so it was not a lot of stress. The class was a lot of work -- there were a lot of assignments that took a lot of time, but it's hard to teach a whole program in 10 weeks, so given that Prof Gao did a great job.