Intro & Setup

Set expectations. We are not making art — we are engineering parts that get machined and bolted onto a competition robot. Stress that mistakes in CAD are cheap; mistakes on the CNC are expensive. Mention that pros at every FRC powerhouse team CAD the whole robot before cutting metal. This curriculum mirrors frcdesign.org but we use Fusion instead of Onshape.

Do this BEFORE class if possible — the install is slow on school wifi. Education license is free and renews yearly. Cloud storage is the killer feature: a student can start a part at the shop and finish it at home. Common mistake: signing up with a personal Gmail instead of the school email needed for the education license.

Spend two minutes here. The Timeline is parametric history — Fusion remembers every step and lets you edit any of them later. That is the whole point of parametric CAD. Have students physically point at each region on their own screen. The ViewCube confuses beginners — show that clicking a corner gives an iso view, clicking a face gives a flat view.

This is the single most-skipped step and it ruins parts. FRC hardware is imperial — 1/2 inch hex shaft, 2x1 inch tube, hole patterns on inch spacing. If you sketch in mm by accident, a 2-inch tube becomes 2mm and nothing fits. Show both: the global Preference (all future designs) AND Document Settings in the Browser (this design only). Note gears are an exception — diametral pitch and metric belts come later.

A Project is a shared folder in the cloud. For the class, everyone makes their own practice project; on the real team we share one project so mentors can open any student's file. Naming convention matters — agree on one now (team number, season, subsystem). Messy file names are how teams lose work mid-build-season.

Demo live: New Component, rename it by double-clicking, notice it becomes the active (bolded) component. Everything you sketch now nests under it. Show the activation dot — clicking it switches which component you're editing. The frcdesign Onshape course splits parts across Part Studios; in Fusion we get the same cleanliness by being component-first. Biggest mistake students make all season: forgetting to make the component first.

Versioning is like git for CAD — every save is a snapshot you can roll back to. Teach the habit of a one-line message; future-you will thank present-you. Unlike local files, there's no 'save as a .f3d on the desktop' for the team workflow — keep it in the cloud project. Mention you CAN export a local .f3d for backup, but the cloud is the source of truth.

COTS = commercial off-the-shelf. You would never model a NEO motor or a MAXSwerve module by hand — the vendor gives you an exact STEP. This is Fusion's answer to Onshape's MKCad library: we upload vendor files into the cloud project and insert them. Show downloading a bearing from McMaster (click the part, choose STEP/Solid Works, get the file). These insert as their own components automatically — perfect.