I'll start off by saying I enjoyed this class thoroughly. Both the format and the content were things I have not experienced in a course before but I think that in this instance it worked really well for me. I learned things I had never dealt with before and I was really impressed with the new skills I developed. I think that the things I learned are going to be very useful for me throughout my education and career, so this class was a great introduction to those types of skills.
I think that the class worked very well for this being the first time. I liked the format of independence to go at our own pace and work things out ourselves as a opposed to a more structured class. It definitely helped me to troubleshoot problems on my own as opposed to being told exactly how to do things.
With all this said, I can't say that there is much I would change about this course. Obviously making the AUV was an experiment because we had never done it before. I think next year there will be a better idea of what works for the AUV construction so future classes won't have to do as much trouble shooting. I also think that a bit more time should be devoted to the AUV project. It seemed that all of the groups finished the AUVs right at the deadline and didn't have any extra time to experiment with what we could make them do underwater besides the bare minimum. It would have been fun to have some more time to experiment with that. Other than that I really enjoyed class and there weren't really any aspects of it that I didn't like.
What other skills/knowledge could be taught?
I don't know how realistic this is but it could also be cool to learn how to engineer a remote control to a robot. For example instead of the AUV being programmed ahead of time we could have it wired to a remote so that we could control it from the surface. I have no idea what type of knowledge and skills this would involve or if it would be realistic for a class like this, but I think it would be something that could be cool to try.
