Collaborating on a Tutorial

[alecmuller]

Last fall we used SolidWorks tutorials I made to introduce new students to CAD. They worked well: each student worked alone or paired with a more experienced student, and I helped whenever they got stuck.

There's plenty of room for refinement, but it was great for a situation where we had 1 mentor and 10 students for CAD.

Recently I've been working on a similar concept for a drivetrain tutorial, and would love to get feedback and ideas from the community. This tutorial focuses less on CAD and more on the research and design side of things - everything from searching for existing solutions, selecting a drive train type based on the game objectives and your team's strengths (props to 1114 for that by the way) to stepping through engineering calculations and predicting speed and pushing force.

I think tutorials like this will be helpful for young teams and teams with higher student-to-mentor ratios. When it's more mature I plan to do ones for other modules (arms, elevators, grabbers, conveyors, etc).

The tutorial is in a Google Sheet, so anyone can copy and modify it (or several people can collaborate at once).
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

I'm open to ANY feedback, but am particularly interested in:

1. Relevant information that I missed in the Research section
2. Errors in any of my calculations (specifically GROSS errors - I know I've made some simplifying assumptions in an effort to make it digestible for high school students)
3. Sketches for concepts you have that I can add to the Concept Sketches page
4. Feedback (particularly from students) on which parts need better explanation.

Lastly, if you're interested in collaborating with me on this, please PM me with your email address and I'll give you editing privileges.

Thanks!
Alec Muller
Mechanical Engineer
Mech Mentor
Team 2342

p.s. If you're interested in the SolidWorks tutorials, I link to them in the 1st page of the Detailed Design, and they're also here:

Learn to create a simple machined motor mount plate and a drawing:
https://grabcad.com/library/creating...n-solidworks-1
Learn to create a very simple part, create mates, add parts to assemblies, make measurements in assemblies, and create cross-sections in assemblies:
https://grabcad.com/library/frc-soli...ox-and-motor-1
Learn to download parts and assemblies from the web, save copies of them, and change them without changing the originals:
https://grabcad.com/library/solidwor...all-gatherer-1