This season marks the first full season of FRCDesign.org, and we are thrilled to see how many people have been using it. We have tons of upcoming changes in the pipeline that we think you’ll love.
We are seeking feedback from students, leads, and mentors about their experiences using FRCDesign.org for their team’s training or personal development. Just reply to this thread with your story!
Some things we are looking for:
Did it improve your team’s quality of life?
Did it improve your team’s season performance?
How did you approach using the course and website?
What did you feel like you struggled with?
What is missing that you would like the website to have?
Additionally, if you have extra time for a more in-depth interview over either text or a voice call, feel free to reach out so we can schedule something. The more we can learn from you, the better we can improve the site for everyone.
frcdesign was great for our team this year, and was the primary way our rookie design members learned onshape. It has been a great way to make sure everyone knows how to do stuff, and we plan on using it in the future to teach new members. Definitely improved our team’s quality of life(we didn’t have to make our own curriculum), very likely improved our season performance(can’t say for sure though but we finally had good CAD practices so that was nice). In terms of approach, we basically just told our rookies to work on the course in the preseason, and ask us if they needed help. Great website and I would definitely recommend it to any FRC team who used Onshape.
As another member of this team, the only issue I had with it was that it was slow, and some team members found it really hard to follow it for very long.
As a senior member who has a lot of design experience I wish there was more advanced topics. I know that’s not really the point of it, it’s more geared towards new members. Yall did an incredible job for new people, we used it last year and this set of freshman are the most design heavy yet. Going back to my point if there were more theory’s and practices of pocketing and other weight savings methods that would be beneficial in my mind
Edit: also dead axel rollers could be a good idea
Our team is considering switching to OnShape, so I’ve been learning the program. FRCDesign.org has helped me quite a lot already.
When I have struggled on learning something on my own, I just find the documentation for that issue and read for a few minutes and fix the issue. I haven’t been using it long enough to have seen any major issues though.
Thank you for creating this wonderful resource, I will probably be a frequent visitor for a good while.
This was our first year using OnShape and we went into the season with a relatively inexperienced design team. FRCDesign.org was our primary method for offseason CAD training and it allowed us to design a highly successful and robust robot.
We found that it was most effective for those of us who were already familiar with basic CAD skills in SOLIDWORKS but lacked knowledge of OnShape and more advanced design concepts. It was a lot harder to engage students who were new to FRC and CADing with just the online tutorials and I think that in these situations, FRCDesign.org is a lot more helpful as a tool supplemented by traditional instruction from students and mentors.
Personally, I worked through the first two stages and then found the tutorials to get very tedious and time-consuming. But, I did find myself constantly referring back to the tutorials for gears, belts, and chains as we designed our robot. I agree that it would be helpful to have a tutorial on creating lightning patterns, as that was a concept that I struggled with.
Overall, it was an amazing, in depth resource that we are definitely looking forward to using again in the fall!
3863 moved from fusion 360 in 2024 to Onshape in 2025 because of FRCDesign and it was amazing. A+, No notes. It was our best season by far, and a very large portion of that was because of FRCDesign. All it took was just me and a fellow teammate self-teaching using the learning course to make an outstanding impact on the teams competitiveness. I don’t think most people really appreciate how special this resource really is, and how lucky we are to have it. Thank you David et. al. for your efforts to bring about this awesome project.
We were rookies last year - kids learn on shape in their engineering classes and it was used on our FTC team, so they were already somewhat familiar with the platform.
The timing of the release of FRCDesign was excellent for us, and kids really dove into it. It allowed kids to get into FIRST things before we had many robot parts, and made robotics much less intimidating. Their CAD skills for rookies was PHENOMENAL and I truly thank this curriculum for it.
It will be an integral part of our training and onboarding for all engineering students moving forward! You all are amazing, thank you for the work you put into this.
FRCDesign played a large part into our decision to switch from Solidworks to Onshape for 2026. The community resources like FRCDesign and the accessibility of Onshape has allowed more students get into CAD.
Overall FRCDesign’s learning course has been solid and has provided us the necessary resources to make the transition to Onshape smooth. FRCDesign has some rough spots (1a & Stage 2), but I’m hopeful that with the support of the FRCDesign team the Website will continued to be refined into an even better resource.
I’m excited to teach our new members Onshape with FRCDesign this coming week.
For a team with no design mentor resources(and a single technical coach with little CAD experience) this page helped us get multiple students up to speed quickly. The result was we were able to design much more complex mechanisms this year, and building our best robot yet.
These educational tools helped us to realize our visions and build better than we ever have before.
We’re doubling down by having more team members use this amazing tool for 2026.
2910 used FRCDesign.org Stage 1 learning course for CAD training last year, and it was great! We’ll continue to use the learning course with our returning designers working through Stage 2 this summer, and again having our our new design team students completing Stage 1. This will likely be our “standard” training pipeline going forward.
I compiled the feedback from our students and mentors for the 5 questions:
Yes, absolutely. We used the Stage 1 course to build proficiency in basic CAD and modeling skills in Onshape, and the design workflow. In the first year we had all CAD students complete this section of the learning course, regardless of previous experience.
I believe so. We were able to beat our baseline schedule CAD deadlines even though we had less design mentor time available than in prior seasons and I think the FRCDesign.org training in the fall was a significant contributor to achieving that.
2910 design students were mostly returning team members, but several were new to the design team. We skipped Stage 0 because everyone was set up already in Onshape Enterprise and had a basic understanding of what CAD was from previous training. We mostly just used the learning course and a little bit of time on the mechanism examples, IIRC.
Summarized from student feedback:
Followed the Stage 1 tutorials straight through step by step. UI was easy to use.
Used gain a basic understanding of CAD/get used to working in Onshape
Familiarization with Onshape tools and practices
Familiarization with common mechanisms used in FRC robots that we might use a variation of in-season
Learn to CAD basic mechanisms
Summarized from student feedback:
Some of the steps to the mechanisms were pretty ambiguous and vague
At times more direct instructions would have been useful but we were able to compensate with assistance from the more experienced CAD students
Especially in the later lessons (in Stage 1) there was a lack of specificity on dimensions, materials, etc. that made it take longer than it needed to.
Summarized from student feedback:
A voiceover to some of the instructional videos would be helpful. At times the screen recordings were hard to follow with the small cursor and buttons
Complete video walkthroughs of the early lessons/tutorials, while still getting familiar with where things are in the Onshape interface
A section on common CAD mistakes/pitfalls could be useful
Overall, this was a fantastic resources for us. Basically all of our design mentors are extremely busy with family and/or work obligations, so finding time to do proper CAD training has been very difficult. The FRCDesign.org learning course filled that gap and allowed the mentors to focus our limited time on teaching broader design concepts while the students worked through the course during the fall. Consequently, I also don’t have much to say directly about the courses since the kids just went and did all of it on their own - but that alone was great.
Our design team went into the 2025 season the most prepared we’ve been on 2910 (at least post-COVID), due in no small part to FRCDesign.org, and it showed.