[s_forbes]

Cool stuff guys! Getting ideas drawn out is a huge part of creating and tweaking a design (and, strangely, the hardest part to convince students to do). Getting your concepts laid out in a 3d environment makes it easy to see how it will work and spot any potential problems. When you get into more detailed or complicated designs, advanced CADing software like Solidworks starts to become more helpful for analyzing things like weight, strength, and motion of mechanisms. Even so, Sketchup is probably advanced enough to cover most things you might design for FIRST robots.

Keep up the CADing work, it's a good habit to get into!