I would like to get a few more kids on my team interested in CAD. I thought about a 1-2 week competition where a group of kids would CAD up a design, fabricate their designs from print, and have a competition.
So my question is, what ideas have other teams done to promote my objective? I would like it to be 1-2 weeks long, not cost alot, but get them excited to use CAD and the end result is compete with a reward?
Any suggestions on competition ideas?
2220 ran a catapult contest a couple years ago that was six weeks long (only meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays), where the catapults had to be electronically triggered, part of them had to be welded or machined, and they had to be fully modeled in CAD. It worked pretty well, but we moved on to different off season activities in future years.
One team did thislast year, and lots of people entered, and it was a good way to work on CAD. I haven’t heard of a new competition for this year, but you could re-use it for your team.
Similar to this, we’ve done a trebuchet contest. Designed on the computer and cut out of foam board from printed patterns. We set up a wall of wooden blocks in front of each trebuchet and they had to fire at each other from across the room. Whoever hit the other trebuchet first won. We did it with a double elimination tournament bracket, everyone loved it.
That seems like a great idea! The past year my team’s CADders split into two groups, and had a group vs. group contest to build an arm from Logomotion. It was helpful in learning CAD but not super fun.
How did you organise the teams? Was it just each student worked individually, or more like groups of a couple students and a mentor all competing for the gold?
Each team was a group of two students, and each student had to have worked on the cad. each group also had to do some research and submit drawings on graph paper before being allowed to begin their cad. Usually, one student would work on the swing arm and the other would work on the base.