The class is very time consuming when it comes to the projects (especially the final project). However, as a person who is not very good at coding, I would suggest you pick this class any day over CS31. I took both and found M20 to be slower paced, and not having tricky midterms or finals definitely makes it preferable. This class will require some work if you don't have a great understanding with coding, but the TAs lab sections are super helpful, make sure to attend those. Also, don't save your project for last minute as office hours are before the due date.

This class was definitely not a hard one. Some things to know, the TAs are super helpful so make sure to go to their office house. Theres 8 quizzes (5 questions multiple choice). The quizzes are not hard they are usually from the lecture and can usually be checked on Matlab. There are some tricky questions though so be careful. The grading on the hw was pretty lenient since the TAs grade them. Pretty much as long as you get the right answer you will get full points (unless you get an annoying TA who always finds reasons to dock points. The final project on the other hand is graded by the professor so it is definitely not as lenient. I made the mistake of not doing the extra credit and I was literally .5% away from an A. Make sure you do the extra credit and don't rely on lenient grading on the final project because even if you get 100% on all of the projects, don't expect the same on the final project. Great class though, you should take it over the summer.

Take Gao! He is a very engaging and straightforward professor. However be warned--this class is very work heavy. We had lecture exercises, homework, and lab due pretty much every week along with the final project. The homework definitely took a long time because you had to do a lot of drawing and googling--not hard but just very tedious and took many hours. The labs were very helpful but also pretty time-consuming. The finals project took the most time by far--our report ended up being almost 100 pages. But overall, I learned a lot about Solidworks and the basics of engineering design. Gao explained things very well and taught a lot of concepts. As long as you do your work, you should get a good grade.

If you have any coding experience, M20 will be a breeze for you. I only watched the lecture videos so I could learn the syntax and see what differences there were between MATLAB and other programming languages. Professor Gao has some of the clearest explanations out there. He explains everything - and I mean everything - step by step, so you won't have trouble understanding the content. He's also very helpful on the Piazza forum. The projects were relatively easy. However, the reports honestly felt like a huge waste of time. On some projects, I spent more time writing the report than doing the project itself, so be warned. Overall though, if you want to take an easy class, take M20 with Gao!

Lectures: completed recorded and asynchronous; fairly straightforward, does some good examples, although he talks a bit repetitive at times

Discussions: a bit repetitive, but basically guides you into the weekly homework

Labs: TA helps with writing a pseudo-code for the homework, which is really nice

Quizzes: one a week; pretty straightforward questions, basically directly derived from lectures; some weird wordings but generally okay

Overall: I knew a little bit of Python coding going in and it really helped. If you know a bit of coding going in, then this will be fairly easy. If not, then the TA labs will be a really good resource.

Class felt super disorganized, I often had very little idea on exactly what the expectations were for each assignment. I also generally just felt a lack of clear communication between the professor and TA. The grading is relatively lenient, though, so that makes up for not knowing what is even expected. I would also come into this class with a group prepared for the final project, because if you don't have one they don't even prompt you to start communicating with your group, and there isn't any class time dedicated to that, you just have to figure it out.

Edward is a really nice professor who takes his time explaining how the lines of code work. He also posts codes that are really similar to the homework, but you do need to do some additional processing to it to make it submittable to the requirements. Even though that may be the case though, don't rely solely on the given scripts. Take the time to learn it, because in the end writing the report that goes along with every homework in addition to the code itself is still hard (as a person who hates coding and has barely had coding experience).

If you are a part of an engineering club that uses CAD, you will probably be a little bored in this class. If you are not and have no CAD experience, it will probably be a bit confusing at first. This class was a bit disorganized and the professor was hard to reach. I personally relied on the TA to clarify things, but it seemed like the TA and the Professor didn't communicate much. That being said, as long as you do your work, which can be a lot at times, you will do well in this class.

This class is super easy to do well and in my opinion fairly interesting and an applicable skill for engineering. There are biweekly home works that are kind of tedious and pretty irreleavent and weekly lecture exercises that are straight from the lecture slides he posts. The TA is very helpful if you have questions but I honestly stopped attending lab and lecture as the quarter progressed. Most questions you can find the answer to online and you kind of get the hang of solidworks after the first 3-4weeks. There is no final exam but a final project to build a 3d rubberband propelled car that was kinda fun. Theres not a ton of instruction so you can be relatively creative. However the report is kind of annoying. Unfortunately one of my groupmates did not participate at all in the report so it was more work than normal, having good groupmates makes it much easier and he honestly grades the report very fairly. I would recommend taking this class with him and am planning on taking MATLAB next quarter with him.

While this is a really easy class, its honestly a lot of just busy work and just really boring. Prof. Gao is nice and he records lectures + posts slides, which is all you really need, but the homework and lab assignments are just so boring and tedious. No matter what professor you get this class is the same level of boring, so it doesn't really matter.