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Amr Baz ENME664 Expecting an A btrettel 05/17/2011	Dr. Baz made grad dynamics easier than undergrad dynamics. I took this class as an undergraduate and I was pleasantly surprised by the class material and Dr. Baz. What was taught in ENES221 was an okay introduction. ENME664 filled in many of the details that were missing and introduced far easier (if you can understand the math) methods to characterize the dynamics of a particular system. Dr. Baz reviews the last lecture before each lecture. This is useful if you have missed a class and I think it helps me piece everything together mentally. He sometimes notes that he miswrote something last time and he'll correct it here too. Unfortunately, the book he chose for the class is not very good, and he admits this numerous times. I didn't use it very often. I found what he discussed in the lectures and the lecture slides he posted (which he often did not cover specifically in class; the projector seemed to be used for when he was running out of time) to be sufficient for most work in the class. He will recommend a number of other books, with reservations. Most books don't seem to cover everything he wants to cover. In this class I was introduced to what he calls the "Augmented Force Method" for constrained systems. This method is extremely powerful and allows me to directly find the equations of motion of very complicated systems with a great number of degrees of freedom. This method is relatively new and it is not covered in most textbooks. In my opinion, this method should be taught to all mechanical engineers and embraced as the easy way to do these problems. I highly recommend taking this class with Dr. Baz for this reason as I'm not sure if the other professors would cover this method. (If they don't, you apparently can read about it in Analytical Dynamics by Udwadia and Kalaba.) His expectations were reasonable, but they were low in my opinion. I noticed that the syllabus listed many topics that were not covered. He seems to have scaled back the class to make it more easily doable. Even still, most students could not handle the work in this class based on what they've said to me. There were 7 homeworks with 4 problems each. Generally these problems were straightforward if you could follow the lectures, however, there were some tricky ones. He provided reasonably detailed solutions to every homework problem and exam, so I could figure out what I did not get earlier. The homeworks can be rather time consuming, however, I got better at doing them quickly as the semester progressed. He's a very easy grader. On several of my homeworks I noted that my answer was incorrect for X and Y and he still gave me 8 to 10 of the points out of 10! I think he wants to see that you understand the method and cares less if you get the same exact solution he does. His exams are basically simplified versions of the homework problems. The two hour and quarter exams had two problems and the final had three problems. You can use ANYTHING you want to during the exams. Most students used laptops, but I found this to be distracting and clumsy, so I made some good reference sheets and remembered most of what I needed to know. Overall, I'd highly recommend taking ENME664 with Dr. Baz.