VEX CADing Tutorials

In order to reach the demand of students wanting to learn CAD, I developed click-by-click tutorials on how to CAD using Autodesk Inventor.

During COVID I taught CAD with Autodesk Inventor Professional to students who wanted to solidify designs without access to parts. This was the easiest one-on-one over Zoom or Discord until it was eating hours of my time. I decided instead to make written tutorials and the BLRS Wiki team was kind enough to let me host them there. After a few weeks, I made a click-by-click tutorial on how to CAD using the VEX kit of parts. Students were now able to ask me specific questions about a topic instead of having me hold their hands through the entire process. The website has seen tens of thousands of people and many of my students have benefited from it.

My goal with the tutorial was to enable students to use CAD during their design process. I was less concerned about them using best CAD practices. I'd rather students use CAD with worse practices than get discouraged at "rules" and never use CAD.

With that, there are two tutorials. One for beginners to learn how to use connect parts, grounding, dark mode (obviously) and mirroring, and an advanced tutorial that teaches best practices while making a slightly more complex drive base. The advanced tutorial teaches about using origin planes, making more subassemblies, and replacing components.