On Starting the Three D'sL Drawing Drafting and Design (DES 1050 Planning)

The first step towards developing my Robotics curriculum for this year has been at creating a way to teach AutoCAD.

The full credit description can be found here under DES1050 CAD 1.

Why AutoCAD? Because it is a very useful tool for documenting designs and planning robots. Our school board has always had a licence and now any student or educational institution can download a free 3-year licence, sweet.

It is a great place to begin as it quickly identifies shortcomings in mathematical ability that should be remedied early if students are to function in Robotics.

On my first attempt at teaching AutoCAD last year I identified two major shortcomings:

- I presented my theory via a great resource, myCADSite.com. This site is great, but it didn't connect with my learners at all being full of words and not pictures.

- I limited them to 2D models in AutoCAD which they quickly circumvented and wandered into 3D..

In short, we have to ask "will it blend?" Of course I don't mean this literally, but I do intend on doing a blended learning environment properly for this portion of my class.

Also, we will be venturing into using the most basic functions of AutoCAD Inventor in this unit.

From a logistics perspective I will have 8 computers available for this unit and nearly 30 students in the classroom; this unit will need to run itself as I will have 4 projects on the go during this unit with all of those kids and limited resources in the areas I want them to cover.

To this end, here is the overview of the video lessons that will be presented for this unit. They will be presented in video form with a maximum length of 5 minutes, If a lesson can't be taught in less than 5 minutes of tutorial, it will be split into multiple lessons.

Lesson 1:
Navigation of the drawing (select, zoom, pan)
First commands(LINE, CIRCLE, RECTANGLE)
Cartesian Coordinates
Absolute Coordinates
Relative Coordinates
Polar Coordinates

Lesson 2:
Creating Layers
Drawing Dimensions
Using the Model and Layout views
Saving as a PDF

Lesson 3:
Using OSnaps
TRIM/EXTEND
FILLET/CHAMFER
OFFSET

Lesson 4:
MOVE/COPY
MIRROR
STRETCH
ROTATE

Lesson 5:
Intro to Inventor

Each lesson will be designed to relate to a specific assignment that allows the students to demonstrate their knowledge of the tools in AutoCAD.

They will end up with five final drawings, each worth 19% of their final grade in this module(which will be designed to take approximately 14 hours to complete).

The next two weeks will be filled with me recording these lessons.

I'll post them as soon as they are complete.

On Beginning Again

I have tried blogging on and off since university when we encouraged to keep a blog of our work through teaching school at the University of Calgary.

Image fromwww.usafawebguy.com

Though it has fallen off of my radar due to the sheer insanity that is the workload inherent for beginning teachers, I want to keep a record of my development through the next 12 months.

This school year will see me teach classes in the areas of Medical Studies and Robotics at the high school level. I will be chronicling all of my lesson plans, developments, thoughts and feelings on those subjects here.

This work isn't intended for an audience beyond myself; that being said, if any teachers out there find it of benefit, I implore you to use whatever you would like.