Teaching with Fusion 360 During the Pandemic

ELIZABETH BISHOP: Hello, and thanks for joining my class today, Teaching with Fusion 360 During The Pandemic.

Let's start with a little bit about me. My name is Elizabeth Bishop, and I did my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Warwick in the UK. I am now doing a PhD in large scale additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, which I'm hoping to finish up within the next year. You can reach out to me on my social media profiles, which you can see down there at the bottom. And if you've got any questions, please feel free to post them on the class page, and I'll get back to you.

Throughout the session today, you're going to find out a little bit about how we at the University of Warwick approached teaching Fusion 360 during the pandemic, and how we utilize the collaboration and cloud tools that Fusion 360 has, and how we applied those to some real world problems. And hopefully, you'll get an idea about some different approaches you can take to a online, blended learning approach that a lot of universities are doing in this next academic year.

So before we go into that, let's talk a little bit about who we are. So the University of Warwick is one of the leading universities in the UK for a unified engineering course. So what that means is we don't have separate schools. So we don't have a school of mechanical engineering, or a school of civil engineering. Everything sits under one roof, just the School of Engineering. And what that means is that all our undergraduate students do a common first year, regardless of what discipline or what course they're on.

So that's the same for the bachelor's course, the B ENG, which is three years, and the master's course, the M ENG, which is four years. So everyone sits that first year as general engineering. And this is really good from a point of view that all the students do a little bit of everything. So they do a little bit of mechanical engineering, a little bit of electronics, electrical, civil, and they can have a little go at all the different disciplines before they choose where they want to specialize in the second year.

So they specialize at the end of term one in their second year. So say you wanted to do mechanical engineering, you can come in on either a general or mechanical engineering course, but you don't need to make that decision until second year.

So I mentioned the build space. So that is our maker space at the University of Warwick. And we are a team of four who run the space. We call ourselves makers in residence because we pretty much live in there all the time. But who are we?

So the team is headed up by Dr. Simon Leigh, who's a reader in mechanical engineering at the University of Warwick. And he initialized this space, and he leads the space. Then we've got Dr. Chris Purssell, who's a teaching fellow, and he pretty much runs the space, keeps everything on track, and he also runs a lot of the third and fourth year projects, a couple of which I will mention in a bit.

Then there's me, PhD student, as I've already mentioned. And finally, there's Elliot Griffiths, who's also a PhD student. So we both started together and did our fourth year projects. And as I said, we are the makers in residence at the build space in Warwick.

So our engineering build space was created because we wanted a space that students could actually do practical things that go alongside their projects. So before the build space was initialized, we have a workshop. We have a general engineering workshop that projects can be sent to. So as an undergraduate, if you wanted anything made, you submit a request that would be sent to the workshop. The technicians would make it for you, and it would come back to you. But you weren't involved in that making process. You might have done the drawings for it, but you didn't actually get to do any of the making.

This is one of the key things that we wanted from the engineering build space, that the students could make things themselves and actually do that process themselves. And that was where this space was born. So we're open normally during term time, every day, all day during term, and that students can come in and use our space, not only for their academic projects, but also for personal projects.

For me, what I see with the students is that they have a lot more interest in learning if it's something they've chosen to do themselves. So we let them use this space for free for personal projects as well as those academic projects.

And just to give you an idea about the sort of things that we do. So a lot of the stuff we do is additive manufacturing because that's where our research group and interests lie. My PhD is obviously in it. So we've done some 3D printed prosthetics, some generative design, some molds, and here's small things that we've done. So we do a lot of fun stuff as well. So we did some pumpkin carving at Halloween. We've got some Christmas decorations there. You can see me with a robot there. And basically, I think what really sums us up is we make things. We just get on with it, and we design and make things, mainly, using Fusion.

So I said you might remember me from the UAV project. So this was a project that's been on display at a Vegas couple of times. I've also done a talk on it in London. It's been on stage, various different things. But the reason I've come back to for this talk is because this was the turning point for us. This was the point at which Warwick University, as a whole, started using Fusion as our car package.

So let's go into our history with Fusion 360 and how it all came about.

So before the 2016, 2017 academic year, we used a competitive product, which was installed on the computer suites on campus. It was very difficult to get hold of on personal machines. There was a lockdown education version, but there was a long process to go through to get it on your own computer. There was no Mac version, and all our collaboration and group projects happened via email and USB sticks.

So I went to find some of the projects that I'd done in my undergraduate, and I was searching through folders and folders and folders, all named the same thing, with loads of different parts in, loads of different versions of the same part. And I remember doing that project, and we would just pass those around on a USB stick. And I think at one point we had a corrupted USB stick. We lost everything we'd done. It was a little bit of a nightmare.

Moving forward to 2016, 2017, so my fourth year when I did my master's project, we trialed using Fusion 360 on that project and also in a couple of the third year projects that were going on at the same time. And we used Fusion to design that UAV, and we did everything in the cloud with Fusion. We were able to share all the designs of the project. And we used that as our main package, even for the electronics and everything surrounding the project.

At the same time, we also started to run design jams, which are informal sessions that we run on a Tuesday night, where everybody is welcome to come and have a go at things. And we started introducing Fusion as part of that design jams as a CAD package that is an alternative that the students could use.

And basically, once we had done this project where we designed the whole UAV in Fusion 360, and we'd seen how that could work as a tool in teaching. Obviously, I was a student at the time, but Simon was working on that as an academic, and we could see how that worked in terms of collaboration and ease of use and things. We decided to take Fusion forward as being our primary talk CAD package in the School of Engineering.

So that brings me to the first year of my PhD, so the 2017, '18 academic year, where I was involved heavily in the teaching of Fusion 360 to the undergraduate students. And we, in the first year, we used a lot of the Design Academy resources, and we taught those in our computer rooms. So students would have book sessions. They'd come along to those. They'd follow the videos along, and we'd be in the room to help with all the questions, things like that.

And then going forward to the next two academic years, we continued with that process, but we adapted the material. We created a lot of our own content. Still use some of the Design Academy work but created a lot of things more relevant to the students at the University of Warwick. And again, we taught a lot of those sessions in the computer rooms at Warwick. And we also ran extra sessions, so advanced CAD sessions, CAM sessions, basically taking the novice user, the student, that first year student, all the way through from basic concepts, so sketches, extrudes, revolves, through to assemblies, collaboration work in groups, simulation, and even through to generative design.

And those extra extracurricular sessions, so those lunchtime sessions we held, also allowed for students to use the software beyond their own academic interests and things like using the CNC machines and creating their own personal projects.

So we kind of got the hang of this. We done this for a few years. We kind of got into the flow of it. We were adapting content each year, but generally, things were sticking the same, the format sort of worked. And over the past few years, we've done a few different projects with that. So it's not just the undergraduate first years that we're doing as those students have come through and are going into the high years. We've done a few different projects. So this was one of the [INAUDIBLE] projects that I presented a few years ago. So this was creating a go kart, so an autonomous electric go kart, using generative design as an influence for the chassis on that cart.

And we also had last year the Warwick Banff project. So the big area, big additive manufacturing facility, and this was looking at high flow rate extrusion. And that was a collaboration, again, with Autodesk and Duet and 3D FilaPrint. And so we've done quite a few cool projects with Fusion. And that's when the pandemic hit.

We had to send all the students home. Campus was completely empty. We were allowed to stay on for a bit, and then the University also decided that we weren't allowed in the campus in the build space. And everything shut down, and we were all sent home, which was a little bit sad, to be honest. I had to take my entirety of my PhD home, try and work out how I was going to do large scale 3D printing from my small bedroom in a shared house. But this also presented us with a new problem.

We got the hang of all that teaching, using the computer rooms to run the sessions, and students following along with the videos. What were we going to do if it all had to be taught online? So let's take a look at that.

So let's take a look at our year of lockdown and teaching Fusion during the pandemic.

So at the end of the last academic year, we'd managed to sort of muddle through the end. A lot of things were canceled. These were unprecedented times, and the University just wasn't prepared for any situation like this. A lot of the practical side of the engineering design module had to be canceled, as there was just no way we could run that remotely. But that just wasn't going to be good enough for the coming academic year.

Most people sort of thought that all this would be over by the start of the academic year, but we knew we needed to start preparing for, ultimately, what was going to be, teaching remotely and teaching CAD remotely.

So we spent a lot of time in front of green screens, rerecording those tutorials. A lot of those tutorials that we'd done before were set up for a two hour lab session with us present to answer any questions. And that just wasn't really going to work for the students who might be working completely in isolation at home, maybe not even in the UK.

So we set about, me, Simon, Elliott, and a couple of others, set about rerecording those tutorials, making them into shorter videos, more appropriate for that distance learning that we knew we were going to be doing.

So this is all online digital learning environment. So this is Moodle, for anyone who hasn't seen it before, and we can embed those tutorial videos straight into this platform. So this is the platform that all students have access to. They go through their weekly activities and then can watch the video. We can also embed those Fusion files directly into our Moodle space. So the students can actually see what they're working on, get that file, download it from here, and interact with it directly on Moodle.

So this is one of the videos that Elliot created about using the sheet metal workspace in Fusion to design a computer case, as you can see here. And we've got all these interaction tools from the Fusion online viewer. And that's really great that the students can have the access to that before they've even started looking at video. So know what they're going to be doing and what it's supposed to look like at the end.

So what's it been like that year teaching like that? So let's start with the good stuff. Fusion teams has been a massive help to us. We've all been working from home. And teams has allowed us to collaborate really well. We've been able to share files, create a workspace to make sure we're not covering the same content, and using files that others, and for sharing those files that we need to where we're following on from someone else's video.

Another great thing about Fusion is that it is available on both Mac and Windows. We find that nearly half our students now use Mac devices. So having a CAD package that's compatible with both is really important to us. And the students are able to download Fusion and sign up remotely. And they don't need to be physically in the department to use that software.

We found that generally Fusion's been an easy platform to get the hang of. Most students seem to get it pretty much straight away, and having those tutorial videos that follow along to has helped them get that. Where they haven't been able to, we have again been able to use Fusion teams. They've been able to add us as educators into their projects so that we can see what's going on and give them some help in that way.

And additionally, there's loads of extra content on things like the Autodesk design Academy. So for those students who are excelling and want more to do, we can point them in the direction of that area. There's also loads of great tutorials on YouTube, so even if a student's not really getting it the way that we're teaching it, we can send them in that direction for additional videos that they can watch if they want to do extra work on that.

The not so good side of it has been that it's been very difficult to monitor the student progress. So previously, if they were in the room with us, we could sort of see how they were getting on and check that they were making progress with those videos. And it was obvious in a subsequent session if someone hadn't finished the previous video.

The way we kind of tried to tackle that this year was to use quizzes on Moodle. So we had a quiz at the end of each week that the students had to pass in order to unlock the next video. The downside of that is if a student hadn't passed the quiz, then I guess they would just maybe give up and don't continue with the videos.

At the beginning of the last academic year, Fusion was only available on Mac and Windows, and a lot of students, a selection of students, had Chromebooks. The only requirement from the University was that they had to have a laptop, and a Chromebook classed as that requirement. And at the start of the academic year, Fusion wasn't available on Chromebooks. So we had a bit of a dilemma with the students who weren't able to actually do the work that was required from them.

Autodesk has subsequently actually fixed this, and it is now also available in a web version, and you can use that on Chromebooks now. So that's really great. That's part of our feedback to them has helped solve that problem that we were facing as an educational institution.

And I think the hardest part for me has been the troubleshooting and helping students who are stuck. We've had to do all of our drop in and help sessions through online video platforms and through video calling. And it's been very difficult to try and describe to you someone, Oh, no. Don't click there. Click here. No. You're clicking in the-- Oh, no. That sort of thing. It's been very difficult to kind of troubleshoot on that level. And I hope that moving forward into the next academic year that we'll be allowed to host in-person drop in help sessions alongside the online CAD tutorial videos.

So let's take a look at a real world application of us using Fusion during the pandemic.

I'm going to talk about the fourth year project group that we had for our research group this year. So they were looking into researching using a robotic arm for non planar additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. And the plan was that they would come into the build base, pretty much just get on with all the research on their own, designing anything that needed to be done for this robot to 3D print.

There was some initial work that the University let them do, so they were allowed in the build space in a COVID secure way. So very limited numbers and were able to do a little bit of work before Christmas. But then the University decided that we would no longer be able to have any students in, and they pretty much had to turn to completely remote working for this project.

So I'm going to show you an example of where Fusion really helped us and helped them with their project. And we're going to take a look at one of the parts that they designed. So as part of the project, they wanted to look at creating a custom hot end to allow for them to print in areas that are more difficult to do so with a conventional hot end. So they designed this hot end and nozzle to be attached to the printer. So they did all of this in Fusion using their Fusion team where they could collaborate and speak to each other, and also we were shared into that project so that we could help them out, if needed.

And they used the Fusion manufacturer to create all of the tool paths for these custom parts and ordered the stock and, essentially, they created all of this on their own and then just sent us the parts that needed to be manufactured. We put them on our CNC machine, and after a little bit of checking, just pressed go.

Now, without this capability, without that collaborative capability that Fusion has to offer, we wouldn't have been able to produce both the hot end, the heat block, and the nozzle for them as, pretty much, we probably wouldn't have really had the time to do that. And we just got the files from them, put them on the machines, loaded the stock, and then pressed go.

And this is a picture of their manufactured hot end. So you can see that on the right hand side. And that matches up with the section view from Fusion on the left hand side. So they created this with the two parts, And we were able to manufacture the-- Well, they were essentially able to manufacture it remotely through us using Fusion 360.

Another aspect of the project that they used for this project was a little bit of a different one. So they actually used the electronics cooling simulations in Fusion simulation, and used this to prove that the hot end they had created, so the one on the right hand side, was more effective at cooling than the one on the left hand side, using this cooling fan duct that they had designed.

And these were the results of the simulations that they had done in that electronics cooling simulation section of Fusion 360. And they were able to plot the results from that and create these 3D plots that show the temperature of a surface, predicted temperature of a surface, using both a conventional hot end on the left hand side, and the custom one on the right hand side.

And you can see how that cooling from that fan duct is much more distributed over the surface where they have that custom hot end. Hence, proving their point that the part they had manufactured was going to work and would provide a better cooling solution than the conventional hot end.

So as you can see from that, we've had a very interesting year teaching engineering design at the University of Warwick this year. We've had various ups and downs, a lot of technical difficulties. And I think it's been pretty much a success, and we're looking forward to the next academic year where we're going to be in a blended learning environment.

So we're going to keep things, like the online class, online tutorials for CAD, but have in-person drop in sessions to help avoid some of those problems that we came across.

Hopefully, you've all enjoyed the talk today and learnt a little bit about our approach to that online teaching and delivery of Fusion 360 and seen some examples of how we utilize the team's environment in Fusion and some real world application problem.

If you want any more, please reach out on my speaker page. If you've got any questions about anything I've chatted about today, please post those on the page. If you liked it, please give it a like. Recommend my class. And if you've got any other questions, please feel free to reach out on social media. There's just a reminder of my social media tags on there.

So thank you very much, everyone. And I hope you enjoy the rest of AU.