: How should a software be taught to under grad students? So I have to teach Autodesk AutoCAD to undergrad students (It's a 4 years Honours degree equivalent to a masters and this is their 4th

@Kimberly620

Im going to answer this even tough its wildly off topic on this site.

You are not teaching them AutoCAD!

Simply put, you are teaching them something that you do with AutoCAD, not AutoCAD itself. So you are teaching how to do drafting, floor plans, layout, die cuts etc. At bare minimum you are teaching to solve geometric problems.

Start by figuring out what the students really are studying is architecture, civil engineering, furniture design, mechanical design etc. Then teach them tasks related to that. Also teach them to read drawings and annotations, understanding a floor plan for example is not self evident (try it, go ask what a complete floor plan is to say the biology department and you will soon see how incomprehensible it can be).

One can not effectively figure it out

Making drawings in AutoCAD is about precision. This precision is attained by one of three methods:


Numeric input from a keyboard
Snapping
Parametric tools


These are all non obvious things that have to be taught first, from scratch to ensure everybody is on the same page. You can not just say here is the line tool. Oh no, the humble line tool has quite literally a million uses, some obvious ones, some not so obvious. So you could easily teach them just the line tool for one semester if you wanted to.

Teach them to think

You are teaching them to think geometrically so invariably you have to do geometry. Spoon feeding how to do a thing actually teaches them the thing in some way. See we humans have special brain cells dedicated to the task of learning by doing, this works especially well for visual things. But there are more utilitarian reasons for this. See you can never teach them complexity if they do not encounter complexity. So for example they can not understand layers until they have used something where layers become useful.

After they have sufficient number of examples done then let them solve problems. This teaches them that going from problem to drawing is not entirely trivial and puts them into a mindset of thinking why they did what they did in the first exercises.

Then let them do a fully autonomous final work that is supposed to be challenging and maybe fun (don't worry university students are weird, whatever you can think of as fun will not be fun for somebody), that requires them to spend a longer time on one project than they have spent before. So that they get to practically understand that complexity grows out of simple actions and need to be handled at some point.

Don't expect much

In essence its better to teach them less than you think is necessary, but well, than go to the essence of everything. I mean I have encountered people who use AutoCAD daily, and have for the past 20 years, that have never progressed beyond the two first lessons I had in AutoCAD. So make those lessons count, and repeat the understanding. You can do incredible feats with just knowing the line and circle tools and a basic annotation tool.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Si6392903

This is a bit off topic, but let us assume the software is not AutoCAD, but any graphic project.


Make it FUN.
Make it practical.
Make it so they can see results.
Make it modular.


Fun.

I was teaching Excel to my 9 and 14 year old kids... Boring... You know what we did? an animated PacMan using conditional formating... Pixel art + Excel.



Practical + results

AutodCAD is for me one of the most boring programs ever. I have never learned it n_n. But how about making a simple room instead of an auditorium and making 3D previews right away?

How about modeling their own home's bathroom? And now re-model it? And then their dream house using the exact same dimensions as their home? Or having some fun modeling the school itself?

Modular

Forget interiors at first, forget electrical instalations. Just a fast and quick solid modules representing the school. Another day you could do windows, etc. Progressive enhancing?

The point is: No one wants to know a tool if you do not know what it is for. It is better to set objetives, and learn one basic tool to achive that. The second step is to know other ways to solve the same problem, and the third step is optimizing thoose tools and processes.

Vote Up Vote Down