🧠 Reflections

Teo Zheng Da
Through M&T, I was able to utilise my knowledge of mechanisms to achieve the desired outcome. It was a fun and rewarding experience to come up with creative solutions to the problems we encountered as we progressed. I found a great sense of satisfaction and relief when we finally developed working prototypes for the individual components. Additionally, this was the first time I had made use of CAD to design custom components for our microscope. As an Aerospace Engineering undergraduate, the skill sets I have acquired through this project are invaluable for my future projects and journey at NTU.

Ray Wang Rui Hua
M&T has shown me how difficult it is to incorporate software and hardware designs, and how well-thought-out designs can always find some way to fail. I have also learnt how to plan out software pipelines which span multiple devices. This project has shown me how important many different disciplines can come together to create a single product, and has given me greater insight into how research and design projects are run. Through this project, I believe I have finally graduated from coding small-time projects for fun to creating useful products that can be used practically.

Oh Jun Rong
Through this project, I learnt how to use Autodesk Fusion to do 3D modeling and printing. On top of that, this project honed my time management skills as we had to plan our time well due to the tight timeframe of this module whilst juggling our other commitments. Over the past few weeks, our group faced a multitude of complex problems, requiring us to apply computational thinking: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithms. When stumped with a problem—whether it be with the code or mechanics—we used computational thinking to break down the problem, identify the cause, and come up with a solution that either cleverly worked around the issue or eliminated it directly. An example was when we were trying to figure out a way to change the lens. Upon further inspection, we realised that the lenses are all equidistant from each other and all lie on a circle.

Tan Xiao Yang
This project introduced me to the fundamentals of Python. As someone with no prior coding experience, I started from scratch, even learning how to install Python on my computer. Through this process, I developed the ability to learn independently—a valuable skill for the future. I also gained hands-on experience with 3D printing using Autodesk Fusion 360, which was completely new to me. Overall, this project showed me the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and how combining knowledge from different fields can lead to better outcomes.

Chong Zi Hui
As the Financial Controller of the group, I learnt to be resourceful by repurposing materials in the lab for our project. For example, our platform was made out of a chopping board from another project! This reduced our costs and made our project more sustainable. I also learnt about the cell counting and identification algorithm, which were unfamiliar subjects to me previously. I learnt how they worked (or didn’t work), such as what characteristics of the cell were used for identification and how we could optimise our training datasets for more accurate identification. When the cell counting algorithm was not correctly counting the cells, I troubleshooted and edited the photos taken, which greatly improved the cell recognition. Being able to improve the quality of life for research that I, as a biology student, do regularly has brought me much joy. Lastly, I learnt to code using HTML for the blog from scratch, which was an interesting experience.