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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.

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.

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).

  2. If you catch an error, ask these questions:

    • What caused you to make the error?
    • Was this error made previously or multiple times? Are there any tendencies in your workflow that cause this error to happen?
    • What can you do to make sure the error doesn't happen again?
    OPTIONAL: Note Stuff Down

    Get out a document or a sheet of paper or even use a discord message to write stuff down.

  3. Repeat step 2 and fix any errors/mistakes you find until you feel that the model is perfect to the best of your ability.

    • You may not be able to find any mistakes; this is common when starting out, but as you gain more experience you'll be able to find more of your own mistakes.

  4. Now compare your model and feature tree with the reference in the provided Solutions Document for the section.

    • Repeat steps 2 and 3, using the solution document as the reference.
    • Add to the notes for each new error you find: why did you miss this mistake in your first self-review?

  5. Examine the best practices presented in the reference. Ask yourself what you need to improve on to improve the readability and parametricity of your CAD. This may include naming things, using folders, and using general recommended CAD practices outlined here.

    Why Follow Best Practices?

    If making your CAD parametric and naming things adds time to your CAD, why do it? There are several reasons, but it can be boiled down to making it easier and faster to go back and make changes, for both you and anyone else. In reality, most time spent doing CAD, especially for a robot, will be making changes or redoing things.

    You spend 5 minutes now to save hours in the future, so make it a habit!

  6. 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?

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

  8. If available, have someone else review your CAD. This can make you aware of gaps in your knowledge and help you fill them.