Betsy McDonald, Art and Design-MakerSpace, Upper School Art
“The US Art & Design classes this year are using Fusion 360, by Autodesk, to learn the basics of 3D modeling. This introduction gives them basic skills to be able to create models to print on CA’s 3D printers. Using Fusion 360 is a change from previous years when students used SketchUp. While SketchUp has an easier-to-learn interface, the entry level of Fusion is also very accessible, and very few problems occur. In SketchUp, it is easy to make a model that looks correct, but in fact will have construction errors rendering it unprintable. Fusion 360 is a huge improvement in preventing this because creation techniques with Fusion 360 were designed with 3D printing in mind, resulting in models which are always printable. For students that need to grow beyond Fusion 360, like our US robotics teams, they often graduate to Autodesk Inventor, which is similar to Fusion 360, with more complexity built in. Robotics teams can model their whole robot virtually before building because the parts they use are available virtually to download and embed in their models. Here in CA’s Makerspace, we’ve become huge fans of Autodesk products, not only for the use mentioned above, but because their products are free to students and educators, and they have a wealth on online learning resources. CA may even extend its US arts electives to include new additions using these projects.”
Student Work:
Student Interview:
Betsy McDonald Instructing:
