This section is offered to give constructive feedback to the professor for future assignments and classes. Based on demeanor of the professor, I feel quite confident that it will be taken in the proper spirit...

Things I liked about the assignment

• Opportunity to learn Matlab - While not strictly required for the course, it is clearly a very nice tool and being Matlab proficient can be very beneficial for me in my engineering job. As the assignment continued, my biggest problem was to not get sidetracked playing around with some nifty feature of matlab, instead of making direct progress on the assignment. I would have to echo the proffesor's setiment on this package, it is certainly worth the $100 student price!
• Requirement to learn/use html for report - At the beginning of the assignment it seemed like a needless complication to require this, and as I was very inexperienced using html, I was a bit daunted by this. As time went on, I came to appreciate this approach a lot more. In addition to 'keeping a few more trees alive' by not producing a paper report, it also made the report more portable, and even ended up being fun to create. I am still a very inexperienced user, having only delved into the actual html source to set the background color of the pages (copied from the professor's webpages, actually!), but now that I am more familiar with the format I can see the potential of doing future documents this way. I guess I will have to dig into html a bit more.
• Only Generated One Movie - I enjoyed running different cases using the tools that I built with matlab. I ended up doing a lot more of this than I originally planned. I only ran one movie, partially due to the large sizes of the movie files created, and partially due to wanting to spend more time on other analysis. The problem statement did not seem to require more than one movie in any case. I compensated by adding an 'extra-credit' section on convergence criteria anlysis.

Things I Disliked about the assignment

• Requirement to essentially purchase Matlab in order to get my assignment completed - In class, the option was given to use other programming environments. In practice, (as was noted by the instructor), this was not really feasible, given the scope of the assignment and the existing work product that was offered already in Matlab format.  Having to come down from Longmomt whenever I needed to get computer time really slowed down my progress. Eventually I ended up purchasing the student version, and don't regret it (it really is a very nice piece of code!), but would have liked to have known up front that that was to essentially be a requirement. To be fair, if I was closer to campus, as presumably most of the students are, this may not have been a problem...
• HTML Pet Peeve #1 (minor) - The only maddening quirk that I continually fought was trying to keep the document in Arial font instead of Times, which is the deafult choice of the Netscape Composer, which I used to create the assignment. I am sure there is some html statement that does this, but by the time I was frustrated enough to think of attempting to fix this, I was basically done.

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