Autodesk Fusion: The Digital Backbone of Applied Learning at University College London

PETER SIMPSON: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this year's AU and to my class about Autodesk Fusion and it being the digital backbone of applied learning at UCL.

So my name is Peter Simpson. I'm a lecturer in engineering, design, and industry engagement, and we're going to go through a few things today, but we're going to start by setting the scene.

Now, this may feel a little bit like a Matryoshka doll, where we're unveiling layers and layers and layers. This is really us trying to all understand what I mean by UCL, what my kind of role is, and where I work really, so that you can understand what I'm about to teach you.

So UCL is we call ourselves London's Global University. We are actually ranked top 10 in the world, and we're the largest university in the UK in terms of in-person teaching universities. The thing that we're most proud of is we were the first English University founded on equal access for all, where women, religious minorities were all able to be granted degrees for the first time in the UK. So that is actually something that we're really proud of.

And we have some amazing alumni. So Francis Crick, who was involved in the founding of DNA; Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone; even Mahatma Gandhi. And on top of that, we have 30 Nobel laureates as well that we call alumni.

We're at the heart of one of the world's most dynamic cities, being London. So I wanted to show you this image, just to show how central we really are. So you've got a bunch of cool stuff around us. We've got the British Museum, the Royal Courts of Justice, the BBC, which is one of the major telecommunications companies in the UK. And there you see our Bloomsbury campus, which is where we do the majority of our teaching.

In terms of our mechanical engineering department, which is where I work, we were actually the first department of mechanical engineering in the whole world, which was back in 1847. Surprisingly, I was not working here at the time, but the idea was that we were trying to combine the theory and also the practical elements of engineering. So whilst back then it was probably mostly what we imagined as more standard mechanical engineering, we now have a broad range of research areas. So we have future energy, biomechanics, automation, new materials, and ship design all under one roof in one building.

This means that we end up having around about 750 undergraduate students at any one time. And when we look at master's students and PhD students, we're realistically having about 1,000 students at any given time within the Department. And more than 50% of our students are international, hence why we say that we're the UK's Global University.

When we look at our course, there are two main options that most of our students study. These are either our three year bachelors of engineering or four year masters of engineering courses, which are both accredited by the IMechE. This also allows them to do the option of having a minor in another engineering discipline, which I think is something really interesting about our courses.

Our teaching can be delivered in a variety of ways. So we've got lectures, problem set tutorials, labs, and workshops, things that you'd find in a lot of engineering institutions when it comes to education. They have a broad curriculum, thermodynamics, fluid and solid mechanics, control, materials, manufacturing, and so much more. And for me as an engineering designer myself, around one in four of our modules actually have a design focus. And that's why I think we're in a really good position to talk about Autodesk Fusion at AU this year.

Again, adding to that kind of unveiling the layers, we also have a building called UCL MechSpace, which is actually where I'm based. So UCL MechSpace is what we kind of see as our center for applied learning. So the idea of MechSpace was to bring the practical teaching, not the tactical teaching, to the core of the degree program.

So what we've done is we've set it up to have a variety of different spaces. So we have team working spaces. We have computer clusters so that students can all go in and start working on their CAD together. We do actually have teaching rooms. We have a variety of different tools, whether that be hand tools or CNC machines. And what we're trying to do here is allow our students the space to try things out, really.

We want our students to use it for academic assessments, but we also want them to use it for hobby projects. We are very proud of the fact that they can just come in and make something as long as they kind of approve it in terms of health and safety first. I like to tell our students that MechSpace is a place for you to fail safely.

Now, failure is often kind of scary for students. They've been taught their whole lives not to fail. But as a designer, I see failure as evolution. It's how you actually get from a design that works just about to a design that really meets exactly the problem that you're trying to solve.

And the other thing that we do is a lot of school and community outreach. So we have things like repair cafes where people from the community will bring in things that are broken or faulty, and we'll actually repair them on site for them. We also do summer schools and different events that involve local schools and schools from further afield in the UK.

So now let's focus on applied learning itself. So the big question here ultimately to start off is what is applied learning? Now, applied learning can take a lot of different kind of scopes. And we're going to focus on two that we really employ well at UCL, in my opinion anyway. But when I'm saying applied learning, what I'm looking at is the type of learning where there isn't necessarily a set amount of teaching. What we're asking them to do is some form of problem in which they're learning along the way in an attempt to solve that kind of problem.

So the first thing that we're going to talk about is what we call scenarios. So these are actually some pictures and one video from our first year scenarios. So when we mention scenarios and when I mention scenarios in this talk, what I'm referring to is a week long assessment, effectively. So our students will actually have that entire week off timetable.

So what I mean by that is those students will not have any other lectures. That week is solely devoted to this assessment. On the Monday, we will set them a brief for the project that you see here, the brief is actually set to mirror the IMechE design challenge, which last year was a repeatable vehicle. So that vehicle started on a spot. It had to go down, hit the wall that you can see in that kind of video that's now stopped, and then go back to the exact same spot it started on.

So what the students had to design here was some kind of method to actually track how far that distance is and make sure that their vehicle is stopping on the exact same spot. The caveat within the rules this year is that they can't actually use microcontrollers. So everything has to be a mechanical system that allows them to do this.

So with scenarios, we employ these throughout first and second year and then we do one in fourth year. The idea is to actually try and mirror as much of the industry environment as we can.

I think at times in universities, we're very used to setting essays, setting longer periods of work where a student is effectively just chipping away at this piece of work until the eventual deadline. What we're trying to focus on here is almost creating our own little design sprints, if you're familiar with agile methodology. And what we're trying to do is get them to all work in a team to actually produce something within one week. So they're going from design all the way through to production within one week. And that allows us to really test their application of their knowledge. So again, coming back to that applied learning.

Throughout this week, we'll hold help sessions where they can come in. We'll always be in and around the workshops when they're making things, not only to make sure that they're safe, but also make sure that any questions are being answered. But the majority of this is kind of student led to some extent. We've sent them that brief. We've given as much detail as we can in the brief or as we want to. And it's up to them to go and take this and kind of run with it to some extent.

So in terms of this with the context of Fusion, I think there are a few key points that we really learnt that Fusion is the right software for us and that it can be incredibly powerful, in my opinion, for all educational establishments.

So when we look at the first point, it's about platform independence. We have this really great thing where students come from all over the world, and so they come with a variety of technology with them. Some have laptops that are more powered than any desktop machine that we have in UCL. Others have Macs. Some just have iPads and maybe have a lesser kind of laptop that they use at home. And the ability to use Fusion on all of these platforms, bar the iPad obviously, really allows all of these students to actually collaborate and work in multiple ways.

As we mentioned with MechSpace, we do have computer clusters. We also have the team working rooms. With the cloud functionality and that platform independence, they could go from working in a computer cluster to going and having a team meeting in one of the meeting rooms, and they could seamlessly access their CAD on any of their devices.

The other thing that I think is really useful, and this is more of an admin side of it from the educator's point of view, we really heavily utilize the share link functionality which utilizes A360. What this allows us to do is basically instead of our students downloading huge CAD files and trying to submit them for assessment, us then downloading them, uploading them to look at them, they actually just submit most of their CAD via that share link.

What this allows us to do is simply have a link within a report or a presentation that allows us to actually go in and assess their CAD as a fundamental model. So this makes it super simple in terms of the admin side of that assessment that we have access to their CAD files whenever we need them, but we also don't need to go through all of that kind of process of downloading and uploading.

The other thing that we do, I mentioned that we didn't have teaching throughout the week in terms of set lectures. We also try and set them self paced learning throughout the week. So what we'll quite often do is we'll say you need to do these two courses within your week. It's up to you when you do them. So we're still ensuring that they are learning during these scenarios, but we're also allowing them to do it at their own pace.

So potentially they all do it on the first day. That's what quite a lot of groups choose to do. They all sit down, do it on the first day, and get out of the way. But other groups will actually kind of chip away at it throughout that week, and they will actually just all get to the point where they have all learned the same amount. They've applied it in slightly different ways because of how they've taken their project. But in my opinion, it allows them to be more in charge of their own learning, which I think kind of tends to propagate into a slightly more independent learning style, which is what you'd expect of a university student.

And the final thing that I think is really important here is that students, whilst being in a different generation that are more software literate, allowing them to have that whole product development life cycle within a familiar user interface that is Fusion, allowing them to go from design to manufacture to simulation and all of that in one place really gives them a bit more confidence when it comes to tackling these problems.

Instead of having to go between different softwares with different pan, zoom, orbit commands and all of the other commands that come along with it, they're able to do that all in one place. This is then more familiar for them, and then they're willing to try things out. And so I think that realistically, for our scenarios, Fusion is invaluable when it comes to teaching.

The next, and I'm kind of going to spend a bit more time on this because this is our full student led curriculum, this is UCL Racing. So this is a bit of an overview of UCL Racing. UCLR are based out of MechSpace. We have six teams within UCLR. So we have Formula Student, Hypermile, Mars Rover, Unpiloted Autonomous Systems, Human Powered Submarine, and a Rocket team. Now, for people within education, you might recognize some of these names, but I'll give you a little bit of context just to help out.

So Formula Student are kind of operating on a mini Formula One scale. So obviously the budget is not quite the same, but they're trying to make a car that goes around the track the fastest and they also have an endurance race. Hypermile are looking at competing in the eco-marathon competition, where they're actually rewarded for their sustainability and efficiency of their vehicle.

Mars Rover, funnily enough, we haven't quite got to the point where we can send students to Mars, but they do go to competitions with simulated Mars environments and their rover is ultimately judged on how well it could perform on a different planet. The UAS team, Unpiloted Autonomous Systems, are looking at a variety of different drones and different unpiloted ways of traveling through the air. So they've worked on a vertical takeoff and landing device, which is vital for sure, and also a few different kind of standard drones that you would expect when I say the word drone.

Maybe the most terrifying at times is our Human Powered Submarine team, who have designed a submarine that operates completely off human power, i.e. somebody is basically using bicycle cranks to actually power the submarine. And then finally, we have our Rocket team. Our Rocket team are still currently aiming to be the first UK university to actually make it into space.

At the moment, what we're trying to aim at is a variety of different competitions. So within UCLR, we have about 150 students, and they're involved across most of those teams. So there's a pretty even split. We've even had some national championships and a few of our teams have gone abroad. So we've had our Rocket team, for instance, actually fly out to the US to compete in a rocketry competition.

So all of this, more importantly, is actually completely extracurricular. So our role here as educators, as staff members, is to try and help these groups where they need that help, where they maybe need a little bit of expertise, but also realistically to allow them to lead themselves. They're gaining a lot of experience from this, whether this is business planning, budgeting, design, manufacturing. We try and keep as hands off as we can, and occasionally we do have to get involved.

So what does this typically look like? So I've kind of devised a bit of an organizational flowchart, something that people in business are probably a bit more familiar with. And this is how it's broken down. So at the top, we have UCLR. We have one head of UCLR that is a student, and they oversee all of those six teams. We then break down into each of the teams. So they then have their own team members. And within those teams, there are generally subteams.

So the reason I've only shown you Formula Student is I just didn't want to put every single team on here, because at some point, we're going to see tiny little specks that represent each team, and it wouldn't be readable. So within Formula Student, they have a technical lead and a team manager, and then they have three subteams under those kind of team leads, where they have an R&D team, a design team, and a build team.

So what this means is it's actually quite a natural hierarchy that they've almost created themselves. All of these kind of positions, whether it's the technical lead, the head of UCLR are held by students, which is why we're kind of so proud of how we're working with this, because we believe it's a great way for them to learn a lot of extra skills.

There are challenges associated with it. To the right here, we actually have our Mars Rover design. One problem is that there are a large amount of student numbers. 150 students, that's quite a few. And it's quite often hard for staff to keep track of relevant files. This can be problematic and in the past has really led to some not significant issues, but revision issues where certain parts were being programmed for manufacture and they were actually slightly out of date.

The other thing is that they have really tight deadlines. These students are working for realistically less than one year to enable them to enter a competition. So there needs to be a lot of simultaneous development on their projects at once in order for them to meet those deadlines to go to comp.

We also end up, as you can see on that right, with some pretty dense CAD files. And these are created with a varied range of CAD skills, I think it's fair to say. All of our teams have a mixture of first, second, third, and fourth years, and so they've had a mixture of teaching. So you have some people that are relatively new to CAD that are trying to design some of the more simple components and some people that are more skilled who are maybe trying to model complete assemblies. What this means is that you really have a variety of different modeling styles. You have a variety of different setups within your design.

And finally, many of the machines we actually have in MechSpace are staff only. Some more of not expensive, but the more complex machines where you could potentially do some more damage to yourself without the relevant training are staff only. So the students will need to submit their designs at some point to be manufactured.

In days gone by, this would involve a very lengthy email thread where they might be absolutely capped on the sides that they can send. So we end up just with this constant sharing of information via emails, which gets confusing, gets lost. And if there are any revisions, again, like I said at the top, it really can cause problems.

So what have we actually done to try and mitigate this? So we've actually integrated Fusion Teams within all of these UCLR teams. So what I mean by this is that we have a central MechSpace team. Within this MechSpace team, each of our teams is given their own project. So if you're unfamiliar with teams, a lot of these phrases are specific phrases for Fusion Teams. I've tried to lay out in the best way possible so that it's more understandable as I give this talk now, but also that you can take this and potentially employ it at your own university.

All of our projects are set to be secret. The reason for this is that, one, it allows all of our students to be safe in the knowledge that only the people in their team can see what they're doing. And two, it kind of stops other students from maybe going in and having a bit of fun when they're bored one day and potentially messing with other people's designs.

What this allows us to do is that all staff now have access to all of the latest files, because we're all on that team too. We are actually the overall administrators of the team. The inbuilt revisions help for the traceability of all the parts. And because all of those CAD files are in the cloud, there are no huge file exports and it allows for that simultaneous development. What we're trying to do is teach them on top of this how to set up assembly files so that they're all linked to subcomponents. This way they can each be working in their subteam and actually still be contributing to that overall design that they have.

So what this looks like, going back to our organizational flow chart, is that here we see two different colors. We have our project admins, who are team members. By team member, they have actually been invited specifically to the MechSpace team as well as their project. This is to allow them to be a project admin. So everybody in one of those leadership roles is actually a project admin.

What this allows them to do is then be more autonomous with their use of the actual software. So they can add new students in, they can control who can kind of edit those different files, and they can really have full autonomy of their own little projects within the wider team.

Then we have our subteam. So let's say our design team. They would all be editors where they are project contributors. So all they can see when they log on and go on to the MechSpace team is if they are in Formula Student, for example, they would only be able to see that project. That is the only thing that they can access. And so all that they can do is really access the stuff that they need to access.

So what this really allows us to do is then have actually a level above this, which is all of our members of staff. With those members of staff, we then can add each of those team members when the teams turn around every year and when they lose members and gain members. But from there, they're pretty autonomous again.

The thing with UCLR that we really like to do is, as I said right at the very beginning of this section, we try and leave it to them as much as possible. We want them to take ownership of all of these different steps, whether it's their budget for the year, whether it's their actual milestones, whether it's their Gantt charts. We want them to do all of that so that they can come out as really polished candidates for future jobs in industry.

So just like our hands off approach when it comes to the actual supervision of this, our Fusion Teams setup allows us to have a very similar hands off approach. We simply add the members at the start of the year that are going to be the admins, and they can then handle everything from there.

The other thing that you can do in Fusion Teams that is really useful, which is something that a couple of other educators have asked me about, is you can actually turn off the need to accept new invites. So what would happen usually, and this is what a lot of people have said when I've mentioned this to them, is that they then get barraged with emails saying x student has added y student. Do you want to accept this invitation?

What you can actually do if you have a bespoke kind of end to the email addresses, so for example at UCL, all of ours are @ucl.ac.uk. You can actually set those preferences within your teams so that all invites involving that @ucl.ac.uk or whatever your university setup is, they are all automatically accepted. So again, we really removing the admin of having to control this all the time.

Previously what we'd done before Fusion Teams was implemented is we actually had one staff member owning the project for each member and it was housed on their teams themselves. So again, whilst we could have had this level of optimization and we could have employed this on each of the given teams, it meant that if a staff member wanted to, let's say, assess the design work that was being done by the Mars Rover team and the UAS team, they would have to constantly remember which other staff member is in charge of that project.

This way everything is in one place. All staff members have access to all of those projects so that whenever they need to dip in and out, they can do. But most importantly, the students have complete autonomy of what they're actually doing. So all that they need to do is control the people that are editing those files.

So we're going to go through some reflections now. So the first thing I think is Fusion really allows us to provide a good mix of applied and fundamental learning. What I mean by this is I think that without Fusion, it would be a lot harder for us to really be as hands off to an extent with a lot of our UCLR teams. And I also think it would cause some significant issues with the scenarios.

We do have limited room in these computer clusters. We do have limited space available given our Central London location. So we want to make sure that they are adaptable in the way that they can work with the software. And Fusion provides a great basis to do that.

The cloud based functionality is realistically crucial. You could have students that are working from home maybe the night before. Maybe they didn't even come into university because they're hosting their team meetings on Zoom or on Teams. They can then access those cloud files at home, come into university, access them on one of the university laptops or the university PCs, and even access them on the web based version of Fusion. Everyone is then working on the exact same files, providing you have internet access, and there are no real issues that can arise other than just very poor management of this.

The real issue that arises at times with the cloud based functionality is just when students are trying to work on a train or something like that and they maybe don't have Wi-Fi for that time. But that can still be done, and students can still download and upload stuff if they want to work in that way and they can work offline.

The workspace versatility allows us for a really easy education setting for the entire product development life cycle. I mentioned this when we were talking about scenarios. Everything suddenly more familiar, even though it may be a completely new concept, because the UI looks the exact same. With Fusion, what you have is a pretty good user interface where if you were ever lost, you can kind of work from left to right in a lot of the toolbars and a lot of the workspaces and actually set up exactly what you wanted to do.

For instance, if you start in manufacturing, if you look at left to right, you kind of are guided to create your setup, create your stock. Then it takes you through some of the processes, maybe some of the probing that you might want to do after, and then actually your post-processing and kind of simulation of your machining. What this allows us to do is just say, as a rule of thumb, if you're ever lost, just go from left to right in that toolbar or even we might set that self-paced learning alongside it.

And I think the main takeaway that I want to show is that something that a lot of other educators have raised as a concern is that actually effective use of Fusion Teams really allows those student led activities to be better supervised by staff. And when I mean better supervised, I don't mean that we're micromanaging every small task that we're telling them to do. What we're actually doing is allowing them to be fundamentally student led again.

So really, by leveraging Fusion Teams and leveraging that functionality, it's allowed us to be as hands off as we need to be. And also we can go in and check those CAD files if we have concerns about a certain team. We can do that without having to interfere and ask them to send us files. We can do that without them even necessarily knowing if it's just something that we want to check or get an update on.

This really allows those student led teams to, again, be fundamentally student led. They even have to handle the admin of making sure that all of their team members have access to those relevant documents that they need to be editing. It provides another structure that, in my opinion, kind of mirrors what they would expect to be doing when they go to industry. We're really giving them those tools to think about and make them think about how they're setting up their team, how they're actually employing resources, and how they're going to work as a team.

Now, I did want to make this very slight disclosure that UCL and UCL Racing have received support and sponsorship from Autodesk to a value less than $10,000. I wanted to make this disclosure just in all honesty to make sure that everybody was aware of this, because I didn't want this to come out and become a problem.

We're very grateful for Autodesk's support and sponsorship. We think that it's a really good partnership that has really helped our students to go to the next level with a lot of their projects and is being used on a lot of specific projects. Like our Hypermile team are actually going for a world record attempt hopefully in the next couple of years. But I wanted to make this very clear to everyone that this has been involved-- Autodesk have been involved with UCL and they have donated some money. So yeah.

In conclusion, Thank you very much for coming. I hope I've kind of helped to unveil a few things that you maybe might have misunderstood or maybe not considered. As always, there will be a variety of ways to contact me. You can find me on LinkedIn, for instance. And yeah, thank you very much for attending my talk, and hopefully I'll hear from some people soon.