It's Week 9 of Spring Quarter 2021 and nothing is going to change between now and the end of the quarter, so I might as well write a review.

Please Do Not Take This Class if you want to learn about dynamics. All the lectures are useless and are filled with derivations that are often very difficult to follow. The lectures lack structure, and the notes are often a jumble of equations and random shapes. Davoyan himself is a nice guy but doesn't seem to care about teaching and it's obvious he puts in minimal effort into the class. The homeworks are "easy" but only because close to identical questions are solved during discussions, and the quizzes are basically the homework questions with slightly different numbers. This means you could do very well in this class but come out of it not understanding a single thing about dynamics.

The lectures are uninspiring, the homeworks and exams are a joke, and I can safely say I have not learned a single thing from taking 102 with Davoyan. And judging from the class GroupMe, I know many others feel the same way.

tl;dr - don't take this class

This is my second class with Professor Davoyan. He is a really engaging lecturer that always makes sure things are clear for every student. You will never feel lost if you pay attention to his lectures. This was taken during COVID, but he was very forgiving with tests. Rather than a midterm, we had several small quizzes with a week to do each. For the final we had a few days. The questions were extremely fair. The homeworks helped prepare you for all the problems he could ask.

This was my second class with Professor Davoyan, and I would gladly take a third class if I had the chance to. Davoyan comes to class and gets started right away most times, with a lot of writing, but also a lot of good explanation. He has a slight accent, but it doesn't interfere with understanding. He can be very direct in what you need to know and understand, but he will keep driving a point until we get it. Davoyan clearly has an immense passion for aerospace and space exploration, and he will sometimes include slides at the end of lectures to reinforce our learning and give real examples of the topics we are covering, as well as giving us insight into the industry itself and the kind of thinking needed.

From what I've heard from classmates, Davoyan's teaching style can be a bit polarizing, with some people really enjoying it, and others disliking it. However, I can definitely recommend this class with him. The knowledge he possesses and the passion he has for this topic are reason enough to take it with him, and if you are passionate in this subject, you will love this class.

DISCLAIMER: I took this class during Rona Szn so formatting could be very different for in person.

Davoyan is getting a lot of hate from this quarter but I didn't think he was that bad. The format of the class for this rona quarter was 20% MT1, 20% MT2, 20% Final Exam, 40% Homework (there were two types of homework.)

Lectures were not helpful at all, I didn't go after the couple of weeks but the material is heavily based off of 1A knowledge so using google and the textbook I was able to mostly teach myself what I needed to know.

The midterms were kind of easy cause they were half problems directly from the textbook and the other half was super open ended that he came up with himself. Since each test was only 20% of your grade, we had a whole week to do it (he even said you could google stuff if you needed help,) and the test was worth 110%, it was super low stress.

The homework was divided into two types, Type 1 which were just problems directly from the textbook (all on Slader) and Type 2. A lot of people didn't enjoy the Type 2 homeworks but I thought it was pretty interesting. There were only about 5 of the Type 2 assignments and half of those required MATLAB. It wasn't anything too hard, just plotting equations and derivatives of equations, I had zero MATLAB knowledge but using YouTube it wasn't even that bad. There was one MATLAB problem which no one really knew how to do, but when it comes down to it that problem was worth at most 0.5% of your grade so there was no point stressing about it. The majority of the Type 2 homework problems was just reading an article or watching a YouTube video and writing down interesting things.

The final was only one problem and we had a week to do it, but it was essentially using everything we learned to talk through how one would plot the landing of a Falcon 9 booster. Personally I though this was sick and an awesome way to test our knowledge, but a lot of people didn't like it.

Professor Davoyan seemed like a cool dude to me but didn't have the best social cues so I guess might have come across as rude. Honestly I would recommend this class cause I thought it was a refreshing approach on engineering classes that emphasized being independent and developing engineering skills on your own.

TL;DR: I wouldn't take this class if you prefer a typical class experience where you just need equations to get by, but if you want to be more independent and develop real engineering thinking, would highly recommend.

you have to learn MATLAB in your own time in this class. You have teach yourself. The homework assignments in MATLAB were very unclear. The midterms and final questions were also unclear. Students are engineers, but they should not be expected to solve major engineering problems yet. It is ridiculous to put a HUGE OPEN-ENDED PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING QUESTION AS THE FINAL. Not accomodating of the difficult times.

DO NOT take this professor if you want to learn about Dynamics. Christ this person gave me an aneurysm. No idea how I even passed this class. Lectures are structured where he just derives formulas in the most convoluted way possible, and does the simplest of examples, meanwhile the final was a complete disaster, it wasn't at all structured like the homework assignments. For this quarter, we only had three quizzes and one final, no midterms; three quizzes were fair but the final was complete bull.

Week seven was when I realized that reading the textbook straight up would be easier than watching his lectures, and it was too late to get back the missing six weeks of lecture that I did not understand anything.

Disclaimer: Taken online during pandemic
I wanted to write this review because I was surprised by the negative reviews. I thought the early homework assignments were challenging because the professor wanted us to think through the problems and write out our own thoughts. I think people were mad because they couldn't find anything to directly copy off of the internet or out of the book. So, yes, many questions were open ended and required thinking and writing. I thought that they were very fairly graded considering how hard it would be to think of every single possibility in your answer. I also enjoyed the videos he had us watch as homework-- this class truly made me research topics I was interested in on my own time. As for the final, yes, it was open ended and a little tricky, but he provided a very clear example in lecture that made it a lot easier to understand. His lectures could be a little dry and I think a part of that was because of the online format, but when I had trouble on the homework I could usually re-watch the lecture and figure it out. Overall I thought this class was good for the pandemic-- we had at least a week to do everything, we didn't really have to watch lecture, and the grading scheme allowed for a lot of errors to still get a good grade. If you have a really hard time putting your thoughts in sentences and prefer straight computations, then maybe not the class for you. Personally, I really enjoyed the structure and thought the professor was good. He's not going to be your best friend, and he acts like he has more important things to do, but still overall a fair class where I learned a lot.

Professor Davoyan was a very strong professor. This class was taken online during COVID-19 so the class formatting may have been slightly different. He was very forgiving to us when it came to the midterms and the final. He took into consideration our time and our online situation and gave us a little over a week to do each exam. His exams were very fair, there was nothing that we couldn't answer and nothing that was a shock on the exam. He was a very strong lecturer, even on the online format, and although I read the textbook to gain a deeper understanding, even if you didn't read the textbook at all his lectures were engaging and gave you all the information you needed. He helped us to understand things conceptually on top of mathematically. The course itself is VERY DIFFICULT if you're not comfortable with rotational motion already, but he helped to alleviate some of the load. Some people are complaining about needing to know MATLAB and needing to teach yourself MATLAB, while it is true that we needed it for a few homeworks in the beginning of the quarter, it wasn't anything that took a crazy amount of time to learn, and was only basic things like graphing and writing and solving equations. I had no prior MATLAB experience and these homeworks were not that much. His grading scheme was very fair (it was split evenly across homework, the midterms, and the final). If the midterms were hard, you had the final to help, if the final was hard, your homework balanced it. I was never worried about grades in this class because I was doing well enough on the homeworks and did well enough on the midterms (which he offered extra credit on) thanks to how fair they were.

Really cool class, and Artur was a cool professor. He wasn't very responsive outside of class, but he was fine over Zoom.

One of the most straightforward classes I've ever taken. The textbook is available for free on ScienceDirect, though paying attention in lecture and taking good notes was enough to complete the HW and quizzes and do well on the final, and the TAs even went over the specific HW problems in discussion (textbook is good for understanding some of the qualitative stuff in better detail than he covers in class, but you can do fine without looking at it or googling specific questions you have). Class comprised of a weekly HW assignment (usually only a few simple problems), three take-home quizzes (basically also HW assignments; he likes to give a few days to work on these then solve it in about 10 minutes in class), and the final. The material is very formula-heavy and the professor really cares about the students understanding the material, so he rarely tests on simple computation and focuses more on qualitative understanding (i.e., pay attention when he defines and explains things in class). He made the class pretty low-stress by giving A LOT of extra credit opportunities over the quarter and making the final (the only in-person test the whole quarter) completely open note.

In summary: not the most complicated class material, and a very considerate and fair professor. Put in the time to solve HW and pay attention and take good notes in class, and take advantage of extra credit opportunities. If you have a question in class, definitely ask it and he'll make sure you understand. 10/10 would highly recommend this class and professor, and would gladly take this class again.