Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Endres
No matter how much time you take to "teach" (I presume everyone sits down in a room and goes over a topic), not everyone will retain the information or be able able to demonstrate their skills effectively.
The way I learned was by watching upperclassmen design for hours on end and by practicing whenever I had the chance. The best time to learn CAD is by practicing, I started by designing and building an FTC robot for 2013, then I moved up to drive bases, then to more complex assemblies like swerve.
The past few years, I have logged over 1000 hours of leisure CAD, that is just sitting down and designing whatever I thought of. By doing this, I learn something new almost every project.
So overall, it would be a good idea to show students the basics and good practices, then set them free.
Our advanced mechanical class is currently designing FRC sized robots to play (a scaled version) of the VEX Nothing but Net game, I can tell they are all learning a lot.
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As a fellow graduate of the "watch upperclassmen and then try it myself" school, I suppose I'm a bit biased when it comes to thinking this works well.
There are a couple of schools to teaching CAD, I find: One is the "learn CAD as a program, as can be applied to all sorts of projects", and the other is "learn how to CAD robots for competition". It's a good idea to ask yourself and your team which camp you're in. It's a common issue I find in a lot of materials external to FRC-- sure, I can now create a helix cut with parametric pitch and depth, but how can I actually CAD a robot? How do I import parts from McMaster/VexPro/AndyMark/etc? What's the fastest way to CAD the chassis our team is most comfortable with?
Online programs are lovely for getting a grasp on CAD theory, but effectively modeling in six weeks (or three days) is a different beast, and it requires not necessarily the broad knowledge the tutorials will give you, but more in depth knowledge of specific features and practical concerns that come up in FRC. It's important to balance the two in any curriculum for teaching students, and I think that a mix of one-on-one teaching and extracurricular experimentation is a good way to get that mix in FRC. The one-on-one part can be useful in teaching the less common/more specific tools for FRC, and the personal experimentation can help broaden your horizons.
I think one of the biggest things to make sure every student coming in knows is that learning CAD is not easy. This is professional grade software that takes a lot of time to learn well, and you need to be willing to put in that time to be ready for build season and work afterwards. Showing up for an hour or two for a few weeks before build season is not going to put your team in a position to use CAD effectively or help you actually learn how to use the software.