Pilot

An introduction to your hosts, Kathy and Mike, as they initiate a discussion on past experiences and the season ahead. 

Creators and Guests

Producer

Michael Crocco

Engineer and Educator. AI in Engineering innovator.

What is Ctrl+Alt+Engineer?

A podcast for mechanical engineers beginning their studies in Design.

Kathy: 00:00

Welcome to the first of hopefully what will be many podcasts for the unit MMA 2,001 design one in 2026. I'm Kathy Petclough. I'm the chief examiner of the unit. My background is as a mechanical engineer. I predominantly come out of the defense industry.

Michael: 00:18

My name is Michael Crocco. I'm also a mechanical engineer. I my undergraduate in Canada. I spent a lot of my career at Honda and Toyota, but also worked within the automotive industry in some other smaller shops. I left engineering strictly about ten years ago and been working on educational projects since then.

Michael: 00:42

What are students going to get out of this unit this semester, Kathy?

Kathy: 00:45

So this unit is the first real design unit that is sort of covered in your degree. I know that it's in semester one of your second year. So we're not going to expect you to do your full finite element analysis or anything that heavy just yet. But there are some really key critical things that sort of come out of this. We are going to give you a design process, so somewhere to actually start and how to start.

Kathy: 01:13

We're also going to think about getting you to give stuff a go from very early on. We're going to use the Design and Build studios a lot, which means that that gives you the opportunity of building stuff that you've been thinking about or giving things a bit of a go before you really have to get it down into the design that you're choosing. What's the project that you're going to be working on? Good question. We're going to be doing the Warman project, which is a robotics project, and you're going to have a task that you're going to need to have that robot perform within that unit.

Michael: 01:43

How complex is that Warman project?

Kathy: 01:46

It's fairly complicated. It will need to be programmed using Arduino. It will need to move a bunch of things. There will be different scores that you can get depending on how far you get your robot to go. That kind of mimics what students were doing in 10/13.

Michael: 02:05

Okay. Does it have to be a robot? I'm

Kathy: 02:09

not entirely sure whether or not it has to be a robot.

Michael: 02:12

Okay. But within the rules, does it have to be a robot? I don't think so, does it?

Kathy: 02:17

Not necessarily. I think we've

Michael: 02:19

seen non robotic solutions in the past.

Kathy: 02:21

Yeah, so if you wanted to do a non robotic solution, you're more than welcome to give that a go. In fact, we'd encourage you to think about how you might be able to get things to move without the use of robotics necessarily. But you will be given a kit to help get you started. And there'll be a bunch of different things that we will do. So this class is going to be a little different to how the other classes in second year are going to run.

Kathy: 02:45

Instead of having a workshop and then two hours of practicals, we're going to have two hours of practical in the mechanical teaching labs We're going to have two hours of studio time in the design and build studios. So where you're going to learn the things that you need to know for that week, there'll be a lecture and hopefully a podcast every week.

Michael: 03:06

What if I'm a student who doesn't feel the need to come to class? What am I going to miss out on?

Kathy: 03:11

You're going to miss out on a lot. So the class is based around teamwork as opposed to group work. So group work is where you have a really big task. Everyone takes a little bit of that particular task. They go away, you come back in week eleven, maybe the beginning of week twelve and say, Hey, Mike, I did a thing.

Kathy: 03:32

Can you add it into the report? Teamwork is where you're genuinely working with people to improve the solution as you go. If you miss class, you're going to miss the opportunity of talking to TAs. You're going to miss the opportunity of building things, but you're also going to miss a lot of the assessments that happen in class. We will have three tests, two in class tests and one CAD task test in the unit, as well as a couple of small reports and of course the woman competition itself.

Kathy: 04:02

And the woman competition does count towards your marks depending on how well you do.

Michael: 04:06

I would take a moment, I guess, to just highlight how this fits in with my experience in industry where, you know, all the design I did involved several other people, dozens of people at times. And while we always had different roles in industry, was really important to have a lot of different inputs, a lot of different opinions on the table, a lot of different, I guess, pressures, right? So for example, if I was working on subframes on on a car, there were pressures around noise vibration and harshness, but also around crash requirements. There's a lot of different things to balance and I couldn't, you know, I could not do that in a silo, right? No.

Michael: 04:48

And so I think this unit is, you have to view it as it's a design process. You're actually designing and building a thing and everybody has to be there. The more people that are contributing, the better things are gonna work out.

Kathy: 05:00

Yeah. I mean, for example, if you take that example, if you're working on a subframe and I've made a decision because I'm looking at the vibration of that And I've decided that what we're going do is we're going to add an extra plate into the floor pan and therefore we overweight that particular frame, then your design's null and void, my design's null and void, and no one's going to get anywhere. So it's very much a collegial situation. You need to be able to work with your colleagues and talk to them about what's going on and help each other out. The other thing too is, and I'm sure you've had similar experience with this, Mike, is if you have a situation where you don't know where to go and you just need to talk to someone, your teammates are the best people to talk to.

Kathy: 05:45

Sometimes we all have really great ideas or the beginnings of great ideas, but they don't really come to fruition until we sort of in market with someone else and you bounce ideas.

Michael: 05:57

So while it's important, okay, in industry and in the design process, I also think this unit is built in such a way that the teamwork aspect is something that's audited and assessed directly. I right?

Kathy: 06:08

Yeah. So one of the things that we do as part of the assessment is that we will get you to complete ITP metrics. And this is for marks. So you'll get two opportunities across the semester to do this. And we'll talk you through how we expect you to give comments to people because giving people comments like that was great, good job, doesn't actually give them anywhere to improve on.

Kathy: 06:30

But we give you a couple of opportunities to do this. And that does then count towards your group mark for the unit.

Michael: 06:37

So let's pivot away then from the group aspect of things and the fact that a lot of groups are going be working together in the class. What about those I guess they're practical classes, is that right?

Kathy: 06:48

Yeah.

Michael: 06:50

What's my incentive to come to the prac class?

Kathy: 06:53

Right, the incentive to come to the prac class is this is where you can get instantaneous feedback from our teaching staff. It gives you the opportunity of working through your CAD problems and also doing things like your team meeting minutes. You have to come up with a plan every week before you hit the design and build studios. And that's where you can get that plan given the tick of approval by somebody else. The CAD package that we're going to use this year is new to mechanical and aerospace.

Kathy: 07:22

It's not a new package, but it is new to our area. It's called Onshape and you'll all be given access to that. Did we, because you and I talked about this at great length. What are the advantages of Onshape over SolidWorks, which is our traditional CAD package?

Michael: 07:38

Yeah, so I mean, this is something I guess I've been, as an educational designer, been looking at for the last more than a year, I suppose, as to what should we be doing long term, that kind of thing. I was really attracted to Onshape and a couple other platforms compared to SolidWorks because they offer like cloud cloud accessibility or rendering CAD in a browser. We've had a lot of issues over the last, I guess, six years that I've been working here with people having a hardware issue or some sort of problem with installation and that kind of thing. That's what initially spurred it, but then my real attraction to Onshape was the ability for students to actually truly collaborate. Gone will be the day soon of having to every time you wanted to send your SOLIDWORKS models out, you had to zip them all up into a zip file and then email them or send them to somebody on thumb drive or something like that and then they had to download them and they could work on them for a while and then they could send them back to you.

Michael: 08:39

Or basically what happened would be you know, you'd log on on one computer and people might take turns or they might not, and it might just end up unfortunately that one person in the group was doing all that and getting all that benefit learning how to do those skills and the others were passing their tasks but not really being able to implement them on the design. So Onshape is going to allow and while there are other there are a couple other platforms that do this, Onshape really does do it the best. It's gonna allow everybody to work simultaneously on a single project. It's got git style kind of branching so you can say like, I'm gonna go investigate this feature, work on it for a while, and then we can have a discussion if it really works, we'll merge it back into the main branch and these kinds of things. It's it really is, know, traditional CAD packages worked back when they work, Everybody works differently now.

Michael: 09:29

The modern workplace or educationally speaking doesn't really matter. We all work differently now. We collaborate a whole lot more work because the tools enable it and you just can't pass that by. We can't leave that on the table. It's so important educationally, but also preparing you for industry.

Michael: 09:44

This is how it's going to work.

Kathy: 09:45

So you can send someone a web link, and that will take them to the work that you're working on. It's all cloud based, so it doesn't matter if you have a Mac or if you have a slightly older laptop. Or your phone. Your phone.

Michael: 10:03

You can pop in on your phone, look and review the design, make notes, and say like, we're gonna need to change this, or this dimension needs to be this, this kind of thing. So this is a product that's aimed at, you know, all levels of a business. So making the CAD development process transparent to, you know, managers who might not be a CAD terminal, they might be, you know, on an airplane or whatever it is, and they can pop in, look at the design, give comments, make little changes, and we and everybody can be actually working on a model at any given time. It's there's no longer do we have to check it out, check it back in, and that kind of thing. I'm really excited for this deployment.

Michael: 10:37

I'm really, really hopeful that this works out well for the students.

Kathy: 10:41

And I'm really excited as well because it will be nice to see what happens in a genuine collaborative environment. No longer will it be the case that when you have checked it out, say for example if someone sent you the file and you have worked on it but they have changed it in the interim and then the work that you have done doesn't come to fruition anymore. It sort of eliminates a lot of that as well. So we're going to be doing that. So you're still going to be meeting with your team members in and around that environment.

Kathy: 11:11

It's also where we're going to do our tests. Our tests are two bigger tests will be done in week four. I'm not sure of the other week off the top of my head.

Michael: 11:20

Around about week eight, would guess.

Kathy: 11:22

I'm pretty sure it's week eight. It could be as early as week seven, but I'm pretty sure it's week eight. And I'll clarify that. And so there'll be that sort of opportunity to do that, get it over and done with. So that's where we're sort of heading within that particular space.

Kathy: 11:41

When we come into the Design And Build Studio space, and again, Michael and I've discussed a lot of this sort of thing, we expect people to be doing things. First week you're going be inducted into the Design And Build Studio space. You can use the space when there isn't a class in there or if they're not full. And what sorts of things are we hoping the students will be doing down there?

Michael: 12:01

Yeah, just on that, I mean, I guess compared to previous deliveries, and just for everybody's reference, I did used to deliver this unit. I've lectured it in the past, not this semester, but that's okay. Still have been involved in the development. I think we had a much longer session in the design build spheres and people were using that time to maybe do their team meetings and all that kind of thing. We don't have that luxury given the main part due to the size increases of the unit enrollments more recently, but I actually think this is better.

Michael: 12:33

Again, relating it to industry experience, you know, you don't just go to the workshop and maybe do some CAD and maybe do something else. If you've got workshop time or you've got laboratory time, you are spending that time doing that work. So I think we're gonna nudge students toward you know planning well for their time in the studios. You know, you've got that couple hours of prep time, you're gonna be doing a lot of planning, a lot of CAD, a lot of figuring, you know, like

Kathy: 13:03

Figuring stuff out.

Michael: 13:04

Figuring out what you're going to do, and then you should be able to hit the ground running, get into the sorry, the the studio, and just build, right? Right. Just build and test and that kind of thing, meaning test your designs. And hopefully that's gonna be a lot more efficient in terms of space usage, but also it really forecasts the students how that's valuable building time, and you've got to use it to your full potential.

Kathy: 13:28

Absolutely.

Michael: 13:29

We're gonna talk about this more, I guess, in coming weeks, but that the real world, and that is how those things work. And so I hope it works out for the students. Yeah.

Kathy: 13:38

I mean, going back to that, in industry, in my time in industry, I'd never go out and just hang out in the workshop. I would have been extracted. Like, get out, go and do something useful. It's not worth your time here. And so we want you to value those times that you do have down there and come with a plan.

Kathy: 13:54

We're going to have a lot of different opportunities for you in those spaces. So we have places where you can do electrical work. We have spaces where you can do three d printing. Mind you, if you three d print a box, I'm going to make that very, very much to your detriment. We have a lot of cardboard.

Kathy: 14:14

So if you want to make a box, use cardboard, use the laser cutter, use something or other else. But there's a huge amount of different types of equipment and different opportunities for you to be able to do things when you get down to the design and build studios. Think about the different ways that things work. And rather than going right, I have to do something that does this particular thing. I'm going to look at it holistically and only holistically.

Kathy: 14:41

What are some of the smaller steps that might go into that and therefore give you the opportunity of working through some of those in that time? Again, two hours, it's not a huge amount of time, which is why you need to be prepped and planned, and that's why we give you those other two hours in the teaching lab space.

Michael: 14:57

Yeah, think it should mean, not to beat the dead horse here, but maybe in previous four hour sessions there was about, what, 30% usage of actual equipment there. So you know, if we go to eighty, ninety, 100% usage during the two hours, there's actually more time on the tools than have been in previous iterations. Absolutely. I'm hoping students see benefit and that opportunity and use it that way.

Kathy: 15:21

Yeah. So speaking of advancements and opportunities, some of the stuff that we've been working on and discussing in the background is AI. It comes up a lot at the university. And Mike, you've been taking that sort of one step further with design. Do you want to tell me a little bit about where you think AI might work in the design sort of stream in engineering moving forward?

Michael: 15:43

Sure. Maybe not in this unit, I guess, necessarily, but I've been looking a lot I use AI in my workflow a lot and I'm trying to kind of stay on the bleeding edge of where that's going a little bit, a little bit as much as we all can. That's really interesting, you know, even just the developments in the last couple weeks. We are on a massively exponential curve here and we don't know where we are on the curve. But I've been looking at, yeah, how in mechanical design specifically can we implement AI.

Michael: 16:13

And there's a lot of ideas out there around and I'm gonna call this like bolting AI on top. There's a lot of like condensing databases and making them accessible via natural language and things like that. A lot of people are doing a lot of that kind of stuff. That is not leveraging AI to do engineering really. That's speeding things up, making reference material more visible.

Michael: 16:42

So if we were having this conversation a year ago, I would have said, the biggest advantage is going to be in taking huge amounts of institutional and regulation knowledge and things like that and making them accessible. We've crossed that barrier, that's already been done, right? We're there, everybody's doing that. What I've started looking at is if I want to get AI to design a given part, okay I spend a lot of time in automotive, whatever it is, maybe it's a bull bar or a tow bar or some other I mean there's a lot of accessory development for example going on in Australia. And so how would I actually do that?

Michael: 17:19

I've been looking into how to make that happen. What has occurred to me and what I want to relate to students is that you have to be able to program, you know, I guess you always think in terms of of like code somehow and you don't need to you don't need to be able to code anymore, nobody has to really. I mean, that's probably a somewhat statement, but you don't need to be able to code like you used to be able to. You need to understand how code works. You need to think of how you would encode the engineering and the design process.

Michael: 17:53

You have to give a tool to a computer, a robot or whatever that they can operate then they can do a design for you. So I think what we were discussing before this podcast was you know, how do we start forecasting this to students? I think the main message is students need to start thinking of their own design process as a process that they pre design, if that makes any sense. So they need to be able to think about how they would document it if they're doing it. And to do that, you need to really think about how is that design process actually gonna flow.

Michael: 18:29

So what that means in practical terms is organizing your assumptions, organizing your inputs, your constraints, and your outputs, and so on, and all those sorts of things and really understanding what they really mean. And I always say to my students, you know, if somebody sets a specification correctly and constrains the problem correctly and so on, that's the design work. And then just about anybody given the appropriate level of constraints will go and, I don't know, navigate to the solution if you will, or or just dig up the existing pre existing solution that exists only because of the definition of the problem, that thorough definition of the problem. So it takes an experienced engineer to really define a problem and to constrain it and that's something that you're going to start to learn. And then it takes a very inexperienced engineer or an AI robot or whatever it is to then go and uncover what the design is given those constraints.

Michael: 19:26

Now that kind of ignores aspects like, you know, having a great idea or inventing it. Yeah, okay. There are And processes for that as well, right? And so there are processes that default to achieve all these things. It is creative work, it's true, but it's not creative work in the same way that traditional creatives think of it.

Michael: 19:48

No. Right?

Kathy: 19:48

There's a little bit of that, but we're gonna give you some tips and some hints on how you might be able to do that because that's not just one of those I'm a creative person or I'm not a creative person. That's very much a how do I learn to flex that muscle? How do I learn to think about things even when I don't feel like doing that? But also within that process is where do you start? Do you just go right, I'm gonna, I know that this is going to bolt to this particular wall and therefore that's where I start.

Michael: 20:16

Well,

Kathy: 20:17

that may not be appropriate. And we're going to try and talk you through, in particular in these podcasts, some of those ideas that as engineers from industry we've done in the past, so we can start to think about how things sort of work together and how things sort of flow and get you to try and start to think about that for yourself.

Michael: 20:38

Something that we're gonna that the students will access later on in their studies, I believe, once they get to design three, is the concept of top down design. Right? That's something you and I have discussed And a we're not expecting that from students this first time around. I mean, this is, you know, fail early, break some things, that that kind of unit. But we do want you to think about how are you going to, you know, architect a solution and and how would one design an overall assembly and those sorts of things, we're going to start to hint at that so you can start to think about how you might implement it piecemeal in this unit, but also how you're going to have to demonstrate those capabilities later on in your studies in the next year or the year after.

Kathy: 21:21

And while we're talking about that too, we want you to think about everything that you learned in your prior studies. Bring that to class with you. I think that's really important. So we're trying to set you up so that when you come to the design two and design three, you've got some experience under your belt moving forwards with that as well. Sorry, just checking notes because I do have them.

Michael: 21:48

I want to make sure we hit our targets here.

Kathy: 21:49

Absolutely. We've got a

Michael: 21:50

bit more time, though.

Kathy: 21:51

We do. So one of the things that we want to think about is working through problems and solutions. As you sort of develop your problem space as well, you're thinking about different solutions and that sort of thing. Mike alluded to failing early and failing is one of those questions or those suggestions that when you say to students, You're going to fail a lot in this class. Everyone freaks out, takes a very deep breath and goes, No.

Kathy: 22:21

And it's like, No, you're not going to fail as in Well, hopefully not fail the unit. But this is a fantastic space where you can fail. As in your design can fail, your mini designs can fail, your exploration can fail. And what we're gonna do is we wanna talk to you about how to do that and how to come back from it.

Michael: 22:42

I'm gonna I'm gonna comment on that just briefly. In my undergrad studies, we weren't given many opportunities to design. Right? We had kind of a couple of units where it was just said, you know, like, and now do some design and we weren't really scaffolded around that. So when I graduated, I went straight to, Honda Research and Development Americas.

Michael: 23:02

Mhmm. That was a really high pressure workplace. It was very daunting as a graduate to be there because I was working on up to five different vehicles, fully different vehicle platforms on five different schedules. Basically what I found there was there was no room to fail, right? Everything was so tight.

Michael: 23:21

If you didn't deliver the first go around, you know, you were at risk of slipping the entire project and that was completely unacceptable because the entire vehicle launched. I left there for that reason. It was too much and I didn't feel I could make mistakes and I knew I had to be in a place where I could. The second job I got out of uni was one where the time pressures were far more lenient and I spent four and a half years in that in that role making mistakes. And I and I don't mean like major mistakes, but I did make design mistakes and have to like, you know, scrap a design and and and start again and that kind of thing.

Michael: 24:02

And that's okay. And I feel like I was really able to, you know, find my designing voice there, something that Honda didn't afford me. Honda afforded a lot of other things to me and I really, you know, it was a really beneficial workplace to work in, but there was just no room for failure. And so having found that, you know, after after having been able to fail and and like I say, scrap designs and start again, I felt far more confident and I was actually in a position where, you know, moving forward I didn't have to fail anymore because I had had that opportunity, saw what failure felt like and I was able to identify those things beforehand. So that's one of the experiences we're hoping to provide students and you should see, if I can speak directly to the student cohort, you should see is the opportunity of university is you you can fail, that's okay, that's part of it, right?

Michael: 24:50

And how you respond is really what you're going to be assessed on. How respond do and deal with and countermeasure that failure of your design, that's really what we're looking for.

Kathy: 25:02

I think that's the big thing is how do you respond? So do you go, well, that didn't work. Scrap the whole thing. Well, some days, yeah. Some days that's gonna be your answer.

Kathy: 25:12

But other days it's gonna be, hang on, why did that fail? That's also

Michael: 25:17

Well, sorry, there should always be why did that fail?

Kathy: 25:18

It should always be. If you just scrap it and you haven't thought about why, then you probably really are failing at what you're doing. And it's not your three weeks of in-depth analysis as to why did this fail. It's stop, take a breath, have a think about it. We don't expect you to know everything.

Kathy: 25:36

That's the other thing. There's a range of skills that you will develop through this particular unit. You may not have them at the moment. That's okay. You don't need to forward plan everything for this unit.

Kathy: 25:48

We want you to be able to have the space and the time to be able to develop those skills, and a lot of that is done through trying stuff and having it go wrong.

Michael: 25:58

There will be students in your your class that seem to not make any mistakes, right? And there will be a bunch that seem to make mistakes all the time. And I think that everybody has something to learn from everybody else, frankly. There are people who are lucky, there are people who are skilled, there are people who are working on those skills, and everybody's at a different level in this regard. Everybody has a different background, and everybody can learn from everybody.

Michael: 26:22

I will point out, I guess, I've seen this unit previous times, a lot of groups tend to kind of ignore the other groups. There's a bit of that, and I don't know exactly where that comes from. It seems to come from maybe like a feeling of like, well, maybe it's cheating to to have a conversation with another group or I don't want to be seen as a spy or something like that on the project. I say forget all that. That's my personal opinion here, and learn as much as you can by having as many conversations as you can.

Michael: 26:51

I don't think, Kathy, you're gonna stand in the way of that, are you?

Kathy: 26:53

No, definitely not. In fact, I would encourage it. I would encourage you to talk to other people about what they're doing and how their solutions are or what do you think of this? One of the things that I've been in and around is people in manufacturing and a lot of them when they are designing products or if someone comes into the market, the first thing they do is they go and buy their competitors

Michael: 27:15

product. In

Kathy: 27:16

the automotive industry, in consumer goods, etcetera, etcetera. They want to know what everyone else is doing. Now, there are a large number of reasons for that and sometimes it is industrial espionage. I'm not going to lie. Because the first to market with something new is always advantageous.

Kathy: 27:36

But also it's just sometimes a reiteration that where you're going is that your product is good or better or on the right track or innovative or maybe that you're not completely and utterly off your rocker. So have a good chat to other people.

Michael: 27:52

I know we're probably getting a little bit short on time. I'm not going tell the whole story, but I do have a story about this around industrial espionage. Look, it is expected. We know that. And so it's expected that you're going to see what classmates are doing and possibly you know, gain inspiration from that and that kind of thing.

Michael: 28:07

At the same time, there is a, you know, there's a couple standards to adhere to here. One is that you wouldn't steal something or take some information that somebody else didn't want you to have. It has to be a kind of equal sharing. And then there is the aspect of what's deemed academic misconduct, right? So conspiring to work so that all the designs are the same, no, you still have to go through the process.

Michael: 28:35

You're not able to just pass off somebody else's work as yours or that kind of thing. Obviously, there are constraints here. But learning from other people's mistakes, absolutely. Right?

Kathy: 28:49

Very much encouraged.

Michael: 28:50

Having a rich discussion about your ideas and getting feedback, yeah, we wanna

Kathy: 28:56

Absolutely see that. Encouraged. Alright. So just wanted to tell you where we are today. We're hoping to make this a regular thing, but we are currently joining you from the Alan Finkel Building Of Technology and

Michael: 29:11

Recently renamed.

Kathy: 29:12

Recently renamed. So can't wait to see you all in class. Look forward to seeing what you come up with this semester. And you'll hear more from Mike and I moving forward.

Michael: 29:24

Doctor: See you soon, everybody.