Everything I learned in 10 weeks could have been taught in 2 weeks. Professor Yang is very slow and ineffective at explaining concepts. This is probably because his english isn't that great. The book is not much better since we only look at select portions, and the professor teaches methods that are often different than the book.

The midterm and final were decent, but be on the lookout for random definitions, and be able to draw random linkages that he presented in the powerpoints. Sidenote: Professor Yang seriously needs to learn how to connect a projector to his laptop. Every time he needed to show an animation, we wasted at least 10 minutes because he couldn't get the projecter connected. Often, the cord just needed to be plugged in!

As for the project, don't bother starting early until after the midterm. It is not THAT difficult, and ignore any attempts to use matlab, as the autodesk trial and error solution is far easier.

Overall, this class is not difficult because we cover so little material compared to MAE 102.

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.