New Website Updates!
It’s been a while since our last update, but we’ve been working hard with updates to improve several aspects of the website.
“Focusing on Improvement” Page
An important part of learning robot design is continuous improvement. Due to the depth of the content, it is important to reflect and identify ways to improve more efficiently.
We’ve added a page in 1A, right before the first exercise, to help guide your thought process so you can improve more efficiently and learn design faster. This self-review process is also mentioned in the verification box for each exercise. Make sure to read through the page and start adding reviews to your process.
Feedback Forms
Feedback forms for the Learning Course have been updated! Each stage section (excluding Stage 0) and each stage summary now include feedback forms asking when you finished the stage (or stage section), how long it took, and any issues or points of confusion. This will allow people going through the course to report issues sooner after encountering them.
The data from how long it takes people to finish courses will also help us give better time frames and make better decisions when developing the Learning Course.
Educator’s Guide
The educator’s guide has been released! If you use FRCDesign.org to train your teams, this guide can help you understand how the course is designed, how to approach training, and how to help your students learn effectively. We are always looking to improve our content; if you have any confusion when reading through the Educator’s Guide, please send us a message so we can address it.
Onshape Learning Center Article
Thank you @Drew_B for reaching out to us about this! We’ve been working on a simple article on FRCDesign.org that will be put on the Onshape Learning Center. This will hopefully expand the reach to more teams that don’t stay up to date with FRC Discord servers or ChiefDelphi. Stay posted!
FRCDesign.org is now sponsored by West Coast Products!
Thank you for supporting us and our teams! As always, we will not let partnerships change the site’s content in any way. We try very hard to mix ecosystems to be helpful to teams of all shapes and sizes.
Miscellaneous Updates
- Random fixes: fixed several issues with the course, especially in 1C
- 1D improvements
- Changed Exercise Document links so the version linked can’t be changed by us without merging a branch.
- Photos now have credits if applicable
- New Mechanism Examples!! Thank you Sidd (@SilverLightning), an alum and mentor from Team 4089, for your work on transitioning the Mechanism Examples category over to a collection only used-in-competition mechanisms, and adding several more categories than existed before.
What To Look Forward To
We have several things we want to work on before kickoff. Though we aren’t planning on releasing Stage 3 before then, we plan to do several reworks and add more resources for teams to use during build season.
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Stage 0
- The current idea is to split it into two sections: “New to CAD” and “New to Onshape.” This will hopefully make it clearer for both students and educators what to run new students through based on their prior experience to keep the website useful and interesting. Someone new to CAD will do both of them, someone new to Onshape will just do that section, and someone with experience in both will skip both sections.
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Stage 2:
- As stated in the previous update post, the plan is to rework this stage and update it a bit to focus a little more on the subsystem workflow—making a first version, going back and changing things to reflect the design process. The project setup may also change, but we plan on updating the CAD models to our best practices standards.
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Stage 1A:
- We’re unsure whether this will get done before kickoff, but we are reworking Stage 1A to be more optimized and teach Onshape fundamentals relevant to FRC. We also plan to offer modified routes depending on experience. Based on current learning research, the following stage sections will also be reduced in the level of guidance, aiming to prioritize critical thinking and problem solving over following instructions.
We also plan on trying to complete more handbook pages and finishing porting over some resources from a previous collection we had.
Another project the team is working on simultaneously is FRCDesignLib! This is a big undertaking, and partially why it took a while to complete this update. Any discussion on FRCDesignLib should be held on the dedicated thread.
Thank you all for your support. Please remain patient with us as we work on the website and the parts library.
-The FRCDesign.org Team