Teaching with Autodesk Fusion 360—How Fusion Teams Enabled Better Group Work

ELLIOTT GRIFFITHS: Hello. Welcome to my talk teaching with Autodesk Fusion 360. So my name is Elliott Griffiths. I'm a teaching fellow or lecturer quite often referred to, at the University of Warwick. And we use Fusion 360 to teach our students and take them from that journey from design to manufacture. And we've learnt a lot along the way how actually enables us to increase the amount of engagement we have overall with our students.

So a little bit about me before we begin. As I said an electorate lecturer in mechanical engineering design at the University of Warwick, mostly teaching things like CAD to CAM to CAE. But also very project-focused work. So students are actually producing their own designs and making physical prototypes of them as well.

I have a secondary role, which is a maker in residence at the engineering build space I go into more detail on what that is. But essentially, there's a team of four of maker in residences that work in the engineering build space.

And our job is essentially to guide students, help them manufacture their designs and actually teach them to use the equipment themselves. So it's just a bit more of an aspirational role and getting them really engaged in their course and actually their own ideas as well.

I'm also a researcher in hybrid additive manufacturing, less so from the side of additive, subtractive that most people know about. I'm actually more focused on embedding electronic structures inside of components. To actually make smart objects that can capture information about manufacturing processes or human interactions as well with objects.

But wider than that I have a passion for digital design and manufacturing. That's really where I sit within my interest area. So anything to do with design and manufacturing in the digital space, I'm definitely there.

So just a quick note on why I'm doing this talk. So I just want to communicate the impact of fusions actually had on the delivery of our course and actually working with our students. I wanted to discuss how ultimately it's actually contributed to quite a significant improvement in student engagement it's actually an enabling software that we use to help students on that journey between design and manufacture.

And there's a kind of a structure in place where it sits in quite nicely. I'll go into detail about. We'll also talk about how Fusion 360 is used by our students. So some examples of projects that we've done in the past.

So just a quickly cover off some learning objectives. So I'll talk about teaching and delivery using Fusion. Some of the collaborative tools that are inside of Fusion that we use quite often as educators that we find really useful. And also some projects examples as I said before.

So just to wind back the clock before we adopted Fusion 360. So I haven't actually mentioned that I went through the full course at the University of Warwick, so I started off as an undergraduate, postgraduate, and finally a full-time member of staff.

So I knew what it was like before we had Fusion 360. So my experience is definitely these next few slides. So we had these old dusty lecture rooms, not very inspiring, and fundamentally there was a lack of creative space for students. So there wasn't any way that they could actually explore their own designs or bring them to life themselves. What we had really was these dusty lecture rooms.

We also had computer rooms, which are great because students don't need to have their own devices, but fundamentally all work was locked to a desktop. So if you needed to use your CAD software, you had to come into one of these rooms and use it there. You could access a form of CAD software at home but it was very limited. And wasn't terribly useful for what most people needed to use it for.

So, in response to this kind of issue that we had, there was no creative space and everything was locked down to a desktop. University came up with an idea how to address this from the purpose of teaching engineering design and how we can make that a little bit more engaging for students.

So the first thing that was most important to us was facilities. So we needed some creative space where students could develop their own ideas in a less informal environment. So the important part about that was that locked down to desktops. The issue we had was there was a real barrier between design and manufacture. So we wanted to make more of a bring those two areas together by making it a less formal environment for students to come into.

We wanted to then use the course to actually utilize that facility as well. So build it into the course by making it more project-based. So the projects can come in students can get going with design and actually manufacturing their own designs.

The issue that we had in the past was students would submit their designs to a workshop. There would be a magical process that they didn't understand or get to see. And there was actually a missed learning opportunity there. So by getting them to do it themselves in a facility that's for them, gives them an extra learning opportunity.

And finally, our final aim will be for engagement. So we want to empower the students to apply their creativity whilst developing their engineering skills as well. And what we do is we use Fusion is essentially an enabling piece of software to link those two aims.

So Fusion 360 if you don't know is not just a piece of CAD software, it does everything from CAD to CAM, CAE, animation rendering. So it allows the students to go through that full process under one roof. So it actually shortens the overhead of going from design to manufacture, which is something that we really wanted to implement at Warwick.

Hence the engineering build space was born. So the engineering build space is a creative space where students can explore their own ideas and actually bring them to life. So instead of that workshop environment where you submit a job and you don't see how it's made, a student will come in, we'll discuss design to manufacture.

They will then take their design forward and they will manufacture it on a machine themselves. So they get that full breadth of view of how things go through that process. So we house everything from a discussion space, so students can come in and discuss a group project. We have basic prototyping capability and hand tools, all the way up to state of the art machinery in additive manufacturing, CNCs and robotic arms, all there for students to use.

It's also a community space. So the idea isn't that you book a machine. You don't book a space. It's very much more ad hoc, students can walk in, ask questions, use the machines when they're available. So it's that really informal environment that we wanted to create for students in order to actually enable them to explore their own ideas and also their coursework as well.

So again, this dusty old lecture room that we used to have actually was transformed into one of the areas within the engineering build space. Was split into three rooms. This is one of those three rooms. It's one of our more workshop areas. The other side is more high tech state of the art machinery. So that's how we achieved our facilities goal. So was baseline. This is what we're going to build upon.

We then developed the course to use that facility. So we very much switched to a more project-focused course. So in the top left there you can see some students have designed a catapult in Fusion 360 and they've built that themselves using the facilities in the build space. We've got an autonomous electric Go Kart down there large 3D printing equipment that built entirely by students inside of Fusion 360.

And actually you ended up with students teaching each other as well. So that really helped by implementing the course and actually using it to feed them into the build space so that they get that kind of engagement early on and potentially lead on to discussing their own ideas with us as well. As I said, we use Fusion 360 and we took that on in 2017 as our main package in terms of CAD.

It's much more than CAD as it can see here. In the first time the students are exposed to majority of the workflow inside of Fusion. So CAD and CAE/simulation, animations, rendering, drawing, generative design. So we give them that kind of breadth and exposure to what the software is. It's not just CAD you can do everything up to manufacture as well. And things in between. So we teach that formally.

One of the things I discussed before as well was this locked down to a desktop issue. That we had so that was a barrier between design and manufacturer. You can't really manufacture something, if you're stuck in a computer lab. So desktop locked and actually what happened afterwards was students were using Fusion on their own machines.

So fusions can be adopted in Max and also Windows machines as well. There's also a browser version more recently released, which allowed our students with Chromebooks to also use Fusion 360 on their own devices.

So we ended up with a much more informal engagement students. There were more interested in pursuing their own ideas. So we actually achieved that high level engagement that we were trying to go with by actually unlocking them from the desktop environment and enabling them to be closer to machines by being mobile on their own workstations.

So the engineering build space is as I said, it's a state of the art built build space with housing everything from CAD stations to 3D printers. But the idea is basically that students should be able to make anything that they want to within the space.

We have some pretty huge aspirational products that we've run with students that are actually led to us collaborating with people like Autodesk, which I'll talk a bit more about later. But they do everything from design to manufacture in the space. And that's just something to really think about. They all themselves. And it's a pleasure to work there, to be honest.

So just to cover off a little bit more about what the students think of the Project Heavy courser work that we enabled through this approach. This is just a short video to go through that.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- When you're at the very beginning and you're trying to understand the problem, you don't really realize how much you can actually do. In fact that you're constantly working with different people from across the year group.

- There's no model solution. But these problems are set by real time.

- The main thing is being able to use the theoretical knowledge learnt in lectures and to actually apply it to real life situations.

- Every project, I learn something new.

- With a challenging, but extremely fulfilling process.

- With a collaborative, inclusive.

- And solve a real problem for which there was no current solution.

- My biggest thing from projects would be leadership and communicative skills.

- I've learned how to plan, organize, and execute projects.

- I've learned so many different skills from coding to CAD.

- Because Warwick has an integrated school of engineering, the range of projects available is hugely varied.

- One of my favorite projects was during second year where the task was to model and simulate an elevator using MATLAB.

- My favorite project was my third year.

- In my third year.

- During my second year.

- Would be one my year one project, where I built a suspension bridge.

- Work maker is by far the coolest project.

- Most definitely being part of the research team.

- My favorite project has to be my third year project, where I tasked myself with designing an affordable self stabilizing spoon and I managed to get investments. So super exciting for what was originally a unique project.

- It really is only now that I'm on an industrial placement actually working for an engineering firm that I can really appreciate the benefits of having such a Project Heavy course at work.

[END PLAYBACK]

ELLIOTT GRIFFITHS: So yeah, that's what we were aiming for in the end and we actually ended up achieving quite a Project Heavy course, which enabled students to actually go on that journey over and over again, designed to manufacture. And Fusion was a key tool in that.

So just to cover off a bit more of a day-to-day use of Fusion. Some of the things that we find really useful as educators within the software itself. So by enabling collaboration, there are some things that really work well with Fusion. One of them is that it's a cloud-based software.

So there are a lot of different advantage to this. The advantages are you can access your files from any device. So they're not locked to a single computer. You can install Fusion on virtually any device Mac and Windows especially. And you can access files between those devices because they're all stored on the cloud.

Another is a lot of the simulation side of things can be quite resource intensive on your device. So students don't require as powerful devices as they used to because all of that can be exported to the cloud. So they can submit-- they can upload a file for simulation, shut down the laptop, or go and do something else. And that software, the cloud will then do the simulation and pass it back to their account and they can access it later on.

That really freed up some of our cloud stations upstairs as well. It used to be that simulations would be running for hours on end on a single computer, but no one was actually using it. But now that that's been sent off to the cloud, we have more workstations that are actually available to use as well.

Again, another stem from the cloud software is that the Fusion teams feature that allows us to collaborate with students quite well, because we can add each other into projects. So we run fourth year projects with 6 to 7 students every year. They create a team and inside of that team, they can share files.

And instead of, who's got the latest version of this file, the Fusion handles all of that for you. There's a single point of truth. And you know that the file you're opening is the latest version of what you need. It also allows for version control. So if you make a mistake, you save over something, you can go back in the timeline and actually promote that version back up to where you want it.

It also allows us as educators to view these projects so they can students can add us in. That's really useful for things like assisting remotely, particularly during the pandemic recently. If a student added you into the project, then you could have a look at what the issues were and give them some advice, or actually solve the issues remotely as well. So it's a really useful feature to have.

So just to cover off some of how you do this. So we can come into the data panel up here. In the data panel, you can add people. So for instance, I can just add myself. And once you send off that invite to someone, they'll get an email in their inbox. They can click a link to join the project. And then that team will display inside of their Fusion account.

One thing you could do is then when you open up a file. So if a student shared this project with me and I opened up this file, there's a comment section in the bottom left. This is really useful I find. And I can actually select a point on that CAD model.

So for instance, this little boss here. And I can add a comment specifically to that feature. So hope I considered-- have you considered a draft angle on this feature here, is it is it sufficient? And the really nice thing about the comments feature is because it lets you select a point.

When you post that, if the student's not sure what you're talking about, what they can do is come down to the comments section, double click on that and it will show them exactly what you were talking about. Which can be particularly difficult, especially if students are remote from you. There's a lot of pointing at screens, going oh, no that button there, or that feature there. The comment section actually really, really helps with remote working with students as well.

Here, if students got an issue, so here I can see that they have a yellow highlighted error in the bottom on the timeline. So I can open up their file. I can go in and review the error. And I can see here that they've deleted a filler which was referencing something, so it's given them an error.

I can then actually go back and have a look at this sketch as well. And I can see that that's caused the error there. It's give me a yellow line. So again, I can use this comments feature to kind of suggest to them, OK, it looks like you're missing a fillet here. Maybe you created one and deleted it by accident. Or if it was a more of a complicated problem, I could also go in and diagnose and actually troubleshoot it myself.

So it's really good to have that option, because you don't have to view it. If you don't have time to see the student, immediately you can get them to add you to the project and you can have a look when you have a chance as well.

Another really nice feature of Fusion which I've mentioned very briefly is Teams. So teams are sometimes difficult to explain. But the way that I'm going to do it here is that we as the engineering build space are a team of four. So we have a Fusion Team.

And inside that Fusion Team you can see down the left hand side here, there are some projects. So you have a team and then within that team you have some projects, which are all separated. And you can add people into the Team and grant them access to certain projects that they need to use.

So one of the nicest things about it as well is that you have this assets folder. So this makes it really nice for sharing things with students. So this is mostly CAM-based. So if I go into a post folder here. I've got a post processor for a couple of machines. What I can do is right click that. And I can actually share it and create a share link for that.

And the nice thing about that is it's a live link. So that updates if you update the file. And that's a really powerful thing because students just know to go and get the latest version and then they know that they've got the latest version of the post.

You can also add a password if you want to. If you want to lock people out or only grant access to certain people. That's a really powerful thing to do. Something like a post processor might not change that often. But things like tool libraries, we change out the tools and CNC is quite often, depending on students' needs.

So if we share a live link to that tool file, then it will update every time we update the machine. Potentially a really nice feature that could be implemented is to allow when students sign up to Fusion and immediate subscription to the engineering build space based on their organization.

And then in there it has by default all the tool libraries and things like that, because sometimes pointing them to a web page or something like that. To download the file a little bit of an overhead. But it'd be nice to have them have that all Fusion, and actually subscribe to it so it updates every time that the file updates automatically.

And finally in here, your Fusion teams are stored at the top here. So I can go and look at our Robot groups team. And what you can actually see is that they've split out their project into sub projects. So their team has got several projects inside of it. One of them is the extruder in the hot end design.

So I can go in here and explore what they've been doing and actually look at their designs as well. So it's actually a really useful tool for bringing that collaboration between students and educators together.

So, I've talked a bit about how we use Fusion and some of the useful features. So just some example projects that we've been through with our students. So here we have a robot arm that's being converted and sent to essentially a 3D printer.

So the nice thing about that is you can do all sorts of interesting shapes and things like that. But the students in this project use Fusion to not only do the design, but also get hands on with the CNC and manufacture a custom nozzle design that they required. So it's really nice to have that all in one file. It's really nice for traceability. And also if you need to change anything in the design, it then updates into the CAM as well.

They also used a simulation environment as well. So it's a bit of an unorthodox use of the simulation environment. So it was the electronics cooling option. But it actually enabled them to simulate the cooling effect of their part cooling fans on top of the hot end, to see whether they're going to cool the parts sufficiently enough. So again, all of that in one file, very useful and very traceable.

Other projects. We've explored things like generative design for producing autonomous electric race vehicles. So this is an example of one of those projects. So the students use generative design to then inform their choices-- their design decisions with regards to large scale additive manufacturing, which I'll talk about in a moment. So essentially printing big objects very quickly. And again, all done inside of Fusion 360.

So this right here is another fourth year group project. They designed, assembled, did all the machining, all the electronics for a large scale 3D printer known as the Banff or the big additive manufacturing facility as we call it.

And that was all done again inside of Fusion 360. And what their aim was to large format printing is fantastic. But it can potentially take you weeks to produce apart, like days to a week if you're printing with a normal desktop size nozzle. What this project was about is scaling that up and printing big objects very quickly by putting down material very rapidly.

And that's actually led us on to future collaborations with Autodesk as well. So that Banff then spawned what's known as Project Vesuvius, which you can actually see down in the exhibition hall if you're at Au 2022 in New Orleans. So if you're there I very much recommend you go down and have a look at our machine because we've been working with Autodesk on it for some time. And it's really, really cool machine.

So in summary, just to bring you back to the slide. Fusion 360 cities are really useful enabling piece of software. So it allows us to take students on that journey from design to manufacture and everything in between. So they'll use it for not only the design environment simulations, rendering, drawings, and CAM as well.

So it's really useful to have it in one platform all organized, very accessible to everyone. And it really cuts down that overhead from an education perspective as well. I hope you enjoyed that talk. Thank you very much, and have a good AU.