{"id":4797,"date":"2021-06-24T11:59:44","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T09:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/?p=4797"},"modified":"2021-06-24T11:59:44","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T09:59:44","slug":"the-learning-process-ii-digital-manufacturing-and-prototyping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/2021\/06\/the-learning-process-ii-digital-manufacturing-and-prototyping.html","title":{"rendered":"The learning process (II). Digital Manufacturing and Prototyping"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>How to learn<\/h3>\n<p>The learning process was also interesting with the <strong>machines and the production<\/strong>. There is a needed short intro, and then you have to learn by trial and error. For the machines, I use to read the handbook, but many parameters and settings depend on each project and material, and they are not described there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Designing<\/strong> with Fusion360 is different. It&#8217;s no ending complex and mainly practical. For me, it was very important starting with a 3-4 hour course. With this and a very patient teacher, I understood the basics of Fusion360 and, what it&#8217;s more important, the main concepts of parametric design. I tried alone one day before, and it was very frustrating.<\/p>\n<p>The first impulse is: don&#8217;t learn, just use it and learn by doing. That&#8217;s partially a good idea. There are many videos, courses and information but how to use them is not easy\/clear. What I found the best way is:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First, start with <strong>example videos<\/strong>, where something is designed. Try to follow the steps doing yourself the same. Usually, there are doubts, and I pause and rewind the video many times. But it&#8217;s a good process to learn the basics of the software and understand different design strategies.<\/li>\n<li>Create your <strong>own design or project<\/strong>. With this, we will have many questions and problems. Frequently I do a design, and at the need, I have to repeat it with a new and better design strategy.<\/li>\n<li>Follow a <strong>course<\/strong>: with this, you have to be patient, sometimes learning things you don&#8217;t need now. But it&#8217;s needed for learning new tools. Without it, we limit ourselves to a range of basic choices we learnt and discovered at the beginning.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Videos or books<\/h3>\n<p>Personally, I don&#8217;t like the videos so much. The advantage is that we need something visual, and they are, but it&#8217;s complicated for me to follow them, and I need to stop and rewind many times, and that&#8217;s slow and frustrating.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes I&#8217;ll prefer a <strong>book<\/strong> where you can see each of the steps, or at least the main concepts, and easily find and review them. But it&#8217;s not easy to find books. They used to be expensive and probably something ancient.<\/p>\n<p>The main problem comes with the <strong>mistakes<\/strong> when you can\u2019t do something. It&#8217;s tough to search in Google because you don&#8217;t know the precise terms or the name of the function you need. To find something visual or just describe it, it&#8217;s not easy.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also very <strong>frustrating<\/strong> when something happens on a <strong>video<\/strong>, and you repeat exactly the same (in theory), but it doesn&#8217;t work because you didn&#8217;t do the same. Where you click, with millimetric precision, is very important in this kind of software.<\/p>\n<h3>Learning from a community<\/h3>\n<p>What we need here is the help of an expert. There are many forums and information, but we face the problem of describing with words our doubts again.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The best way is to have someone with you,<\/strong> watching your monitor and ask him. Usually not a super expert in needed, just someone with more experience than you, that had this issue in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Organizing a small &#8220;<strong>learning group<\/strong>&#8221; is a great idea. We had something like that in the coworking, but now it&#8217;s not possible because of the Covid-19. Here the challenge is to find people with a similar level that could help each other, and ideally, a generous expert helping everyone. But it should be a real exchange, not just a free course, and that&#8217;s not easy to achieve.<\/p>\n<p>As mentioned, you need curious people with interest and the right attitude and some free time for sharing.<\/p>\n<h3>Conclusions<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>There are, fortunately, <strong>many free resources<\/strong>, videos, and good courses to learn about design and tools.<\/li>\n<li>Having<strong> the goal of creating something is really needed<\/strong> for real learning. Without it, there&#8217;s no motivation.<\/li>\n<li>To research alone and discover things, just by the use is ok. But<strong> the right balance between theory and practice is better<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Everything that we learn is a job. <strong>Do not expect to master it in an evening<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>There are<strong> many disciples here<\/strong>. In the beginning, it is very confusing, and it&#8217;s like a fog that doesn&#8217;t let you see the next step correctly.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Learning in a group<\/strong>, or having people to advise you, could help in many frustrating situations and make you learn faster.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Videos are not an ideal solution<\/strong> for learning, at least for me. <strong>But they are appropriate<\/strong> for something very visual, where searching with words is not easy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-4798\" src=\"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/courses-video.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"90%\" height=\"90%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/courses-video.jpg 918w, https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/courses-video-300x244.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/courses-video-768x626.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 918px) 100vw, 918px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to learn The learning process was also interesting with the machines and the production. There is a needed short intro, and then you have to learn by trial and error. For the machines, I use to read the handbook, but many parameters and settings depend on each project and material, and they are not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1810,1807,121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital_transformation","category-industry","category-insights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4797"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4802,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4797\/revisions\/4802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wlappe.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}