[Mark Sheridan]

This year we had 3 students as CAD leads and about 5 more students helping here in there. Of the student leads, one was trained by taking a community college class and the other two learned from tutorials, peers and mentors. Two of them had their own cad computers. We had two cad mentors including me. We have 2 workstations and 3 CAD laptops. So when I bring my own laptop, we have about 8 computers in total. We have a server and use Solidworks PDM to manage our files. We also use GrabCAD and would use it more if we had a better internet connection at our build area. We mostly use GrabCAD to share ideas and side projects.

The 3 leads manage their own main assemblies and designs, the remaining students floated around. So we started with drive, turret and intake; we later added the tower, and scaler. The mentors review their design and help spring board the student ideas. We help teach students who are struggling or found a particularly difficult challenge. For example this year, I taught a student how to design a sprocket using the machinery handbook for reference.

CAD remains our bottle neck, and I would like all the CAD students to stick to their own projects rather then being chaotically move around. We improved this year by giving our students the necessary skills to take initiative but there is still improvement to be made. We are improving our CAD training and using CAM training to also give students a chance to build their own ideas before the build season. 2 of the lead CAD students are returning next year. I hope to have 6 lead CAD students by next year.