Idea: "CAD-a-thon"

[KohKohPuffs]

Originally Posted by thinker&planner

I would love to attend an event like this. But the closest FRC team to us is 100mi away.
How about an online event or option? Google Hangouts is our friend.

I learned CAD through Google Hangouts, especially through the screenshare. The only problem was that there were other people on Google Hangouts that had difficulties, but all the instructor could really do was verbally tell him/her how to fix the problem, and that turned out to be a big obstacle. But then again, these people weren't so much familiar with the Solidworks interface coming into the session.

Originally Posted by Chak

I would love to attend something like this. I'm mostly self-taught in CAD, so it would be awesome to see how other people work and how other teams design.
Maybe you can pose a challenge/topic at the beginning of the CAD-a-thon, have diverse groups (different teams/age) try and design something. Then we can see how others work directly and get to know people on other teams. Afterwards groups can present and everyone will get exposed to different designs.
The CAD-a-thon can also have some 3D printers running. That would be fun.
I see that all three posts on this thread so far are from the Bay Area. Hmmm...

Challenges, so like "build a butterfly drive/ swerve drive/ dual speed gearbox/ etc." Yeah, I think they had something like that in one local Hackathon that I kind of crashed during build season

So if something like this were to be in the Bay Area, where specifically would it be? Like, how willing would people want to travel x miles to this (in addition, this would be experimental at the start, so maybe it won't be great at first)?

Chak, since you are from 4159, a team from San Francisco, I would like to ask: How long did it take your team to travel to attend CalGames, and if it was long, did it bother anyone? Maybe this will give me an idea of how far people want to go for this.