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Focusing on Improvement

When going through the exercises throughout Stage 1 and 2, an intentional focus on improving specific skills and speeding up your workflow can help accelerate your learning and make the exercises more effective.

Exercise Instructions

When doing an exercise, follow these steps:

OPTIONAL: Time Yourself

Optionally, start a stopwatch or timer or record yourself doing CAD. This can help you focus better, but also creates a better sense of awareness of what you're spending the most time on so you can focus on that in the future.

  1. Try to catch errors as you are modeling. This may be based on awareness built from prior reviews and experience.
  2. Get your CAD as close to finished as possible.
  3. Take a 5-minute break doing something else that isn't your project or on devices. Walking around, cleaning your room/shop, doing laundry, etc.

Review Instructions

The review at the end is to catch the mistakes you didn't catch during your design process. As you build awareness, knowledge, and intuition, you will learn to focus on not making those mistakes again or finding them and fixing them while modeling.

It's important to start this early and be consistent to stop bad habits from forming!

After doing your exercise and taking the 5-minute break, use the following instructions/template to self-review effectively:

  1. Check your model without using the reference solution first to see if you missed anything or made any mistakes along the way (an offset is wrong, a wrong mate connector was used, you missed a part), then try to fix those mistakes.

  2. Now compare your model and feature tree with the reference in the provided Solutions Document for the section and fix any mistakes you find.

    • You can spend 5 minutes now on good practices to save hours in the future!

  3. Final reflections:

    • How did you feel about your workflow and your time spent? Were there any parts of your CAD process that felt particularly slow? Anything you struggled on?
    • What caused you to struggle on those particular processes? Is there a certain lack of experience or knowledge that caused you to have difficulty there?
    • What do you need to learn or practice to get better in those areas?

During future exercises and projects, use this review to intentionally focus on the parts of your practices and workflow that need improvement.

OPTIONAL: Have a Mentor Help Review

Your student design lead or mentor, if available, can help review your exercise by asking the questions in the following instructions, alongside giving their own feedback. This is best done after your own self-review, though.