Very clear lectures and very interesting material. He basically invented this field of study and he is young so he knows how to teach it well. It's a lot of 3D visualizing systems rather than doing math. 5 homeworks that aren't too hard, but need to be turned in as a hard copy on time or else you get no credit. Involves MATLAB and SolidWorks. The midterm was good. Final was brutal and only covered the last couple weeks of material (average 62). He doesn't usually curve but he had to for this one. The group project was interesting and fun to complete. This quarter, we designed and built a toy for Kinder eggs and he got a representative from the company to watch our presentations. I would take the course again since he is entertaining, there's not much math, and the content seems important for the future of design.

Lectures are prerecorded. There were also in person lectures for extra practice problems, and in person project meetings with the prof. Weekly HWs, 2 exams, and 1 project. Exam 1 was okay and exam 2 was difficult but curved. Going over all the practice problems he gives is probably enough to get an A. The project this year was a bit crazy - 20+ person groups. Hopkins himself said it's unideal but he can only handle 7 or so projects for the entire class. Projects were pretty interesting, but a lot of the group ended up doing very little. Overall workload is not too bad in comparison to other mechE classes.

The class material is pretty interesting. Professor Hopkins actually created much of the stuff he's teaching, so he lectures on it well. I would def recommend this class as an elective, very interesting and not too hard.

Prerecorded lectures, great explanations in class, lots of helpful example problems and tests can be difficult but if you went to class and did the homeworks, there are no curveballs, so I thought the questions were very fair. Compliant mechanisms are soon going to be absolutely everywhere in mechanical design, so I highly recommend this class as Hopkins is a world-class researcher in this rapidly developing field.

However, having 19 to 38 people per final project group made it a gigantic mess, and only a handful of students actually did any work. It was so logistically complicated and overwhelming, it made the last few weeks of this course unbearable. If it wasn't for the final project, this class would be an overall 5/5 without a doubt.