Engineering Education: How Today's Youth Learns CAD Skills in an Online Environment

The purpose of this project is to assess how well today’s youth is able to learn new skills<br/>in the realm of engineering through online video-conferencing resources. Each semester of this<br/>last year, a class of students in both 3rd and 6th grade learned about computer-aided design (CAD)<br/>and 3D printing through their laptops at school. This was done by conducting online lessons of<br/>TinkerCAD via Zoom and Google Meet. TinkerCAD is a simple website that incorporates easy-to-learn skills and gives students an introduction to some of the basic operations that are used in<br/>everyday CAD endeavors. In each lesson, the students would learn new skills by creating<br/>increasingly difficult objects that would test both their ability to learn new skills and their overall<br/>enjoyment with the subject matter. The findings of this project reflect that students are able to<br/>quickly learn and retain new information relating to CAD. The group of 6th graders was able to<br/>learn much faster, which was expected, but the class of 3rd graders still maintained the<br/>knowledge gained from previous lessons and were able to construct increasingly complicated<br/>objects without much struggle. Overall, the students in both classes enjoyed the lessons and did<br/>not find them too difficult, despite the online environment that we were required to use. Some<br/>students found the material more interesting than others, but in general, the students found it<br/>enjoyable to learn about a new skill that has significant real-world applications