I’ve been a CAD teacher before but it was never on a huge scale, the most I have done is show quite a lot of people how to do very minimal tasks. I have an actual student that I need to teach them the fundamentals and everything they need to learn to know how to do CAD. Does anyone have any recommendations on how I should teach my students? I don’t want them to have a bad teacher.
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@Jonas has a good bit of excellent teaching resources for CAD
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If they are using Onshape, the tutorials are pretty good. I tell my students to start there for at-home work.
I also link the Spectrum training resource page: Spectrum FRC Training Curriculum
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This also exists for onshape.
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MKCAD is the biggest boon for Onshape, there’s no reason to model the bits and pieces of a motor if someone else has done it for you. Great for making sure your robot lines up and for public documents.
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I would second this by saying that learning how to use tools around the core modeling tools is very important to saving you a lot of headache and time. From the most important like MKCAD and your teams personal parts library. To odd things like Keyhole generator for 3d printed parts. Them I was designing stuff for a while with our MKCAD and it was a pain but once I started using it everything got a ton easier, the. Learning how to use the configurable parts like the 20dp gears and the “Motor” part.
I am currently on mobile but I should probably post a full list of the if feature scripts I regularly use when I get back to my computer.
The main ones are:
- Default Hole tool(not a feature script but I didn’t leaner it was there for a while)
- Box tube converter
- 80-20 generator
- Chain generator
- Belt generator(I am currently floating between two, I am not sure which is best for me)
- Lighten tool(it is a different one that the main one)
SolidProfessor is part of the Kit of Parts. You can email them and get a login and they have a lot of tutorials. I’ve used them for Fusion360. Its professional and well thought out and thorough.
They have different video series for various software packages.
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In terms of teaching a single or few students, the:
I do, you watch
I do, you help
I help, you do
I watch, you do
Framework does pretty well.
Another alternative is having them pursue hard projects and constantly give design review and feedback to get them to improve.
I think besides the point here, it really depends on your goals.
Are you already an accomplished/good designer? If you are a particularly strong designer you can get new designers from 0 to really good quickly by just giving them feedback and making sure they follow your workflow.
If you just want to introduce people to CAD, I mean sure you can just give it them simple stuff. If you want to be working with them and making sure they meaningfully contribute as a designer during the season, the work is very much different.
Of course there’s the robochargers curriculum and onshape’s learning center, but if you want them to learn fast, hard projects with feedback can beat that easily. You can get a kid from 0 to soloing high quality mechanisms with a bit of help in a few months, assuming they have motivation.
How good of a designer are you? Just make sure to keep improving as a designer as you train others, you want to make sure to raise the ceiling otherwise there’s no room to raise the floor.
There’s plenty of people who are willing to help you improve too, if you want feedback, there are online frc design communities which offer design reviews and help. There is a HUGE knowledge discrepancy between most designers teaching their kiddos and the design community. Catch up with what’s meta (multi part modeling, top down design, cots usage, document setup, ect) and it’ll be a lot easier to teach your kids with current information. There’s a lot of surface level stuff like mkcad and featurescripts, but that’s really the tip of the iceberg in terms of design.
Sorry that it’s so hard to access though.
One of the fastest ways to improve is to try something hard, reflect on the experience, experiment on it, and get feedback from others. Do it a lot, and you can improve fast. Also applies to other parts in life.
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This parallels the edge method used in scouting:
- E: Explaining the task
- D: Demonstrating the steps of the task
- G: Guiding the student through the steps of the task
- E: Enabling the student to do the task on their own
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