[Madison]

I think singling out that the students are rendering pictures of their models is a pointless exercise. That process takes a small fraction of time compared to what likely goes into modeling and constraining the parts in the first place.

I think, in reality, a point that can be successfully made is that a lot of these designs are built upon completely arbitrary criteria that have no real-world implications. They all mimic one another and those that have been successful before them, but they're not designed for any other particular purpose. Teams have had success copying 60/254/968, 148/217, et. al., but they never really grasp what makes these teams opt for certain methods or materials. That's something of a problem.

I can assure you that there are many more people that know how to operate CAD than can design effectively. We have tremendous trouble where I work finding people that are qualified to do both and frequent trouble finding people qualified to do even one or the other.

All of that being said, I learned a lot of what I know about design and all of what I know about CAD from messing around and trying to improve upon things I saw here and at competitions. With time, I grew to understand more about why certain designs worked and why others didn't and experienced a fair share of failures. I've been working as a design engineer for about four years now and am pretty damned good at it as a result of what I learned here. I think these forums can continue to be useful to new people in that regard if they're clear about the intent of their design.

When folks post a new picture or idea, it'd be amazing if they also outlined the constraints they worked under while designing and evaluated if they met those goals. Allow yourselves a hard limit on weight or materials or resources and see what you come up with.