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Recently I have read several discussions where many good GrabCAD users express their concern about various problems, such as spam control, quality of work, and prestige/usefulness of the community. They even fight among themselves (who are on the good team) because of others who do things wrong, from the shadows and knowing that their actions will not be easily canceled or punished.
My modest proposal is to "act positively": if it is difficult to combat what is bad, let's add things that are good in the hope of balancing or, at least, contrasting so that the bad does not end up overshadowing the good.
In this sense, since last year I have been adding my mechanical engineering students from UNR to the GC community, whom I demand to work hard with the quality of what they publish. To this end, I make them participate (whenever possible) actively in NASA challenges such as https://grabcad.com/challenges/nasa-challenge-positive-connections-a-mechanism-to-connect-on-contact which was won by one of them https://grabcad.com/library/egyptian-key-1.
In the absence of an active challenge, we are now doing "solution post-processing" work based on https://grabcad.com/challenges/nasa-challenge-lunar-gateway-cargo-packing-and-storing. The deadline is April 24, but there are already some proposals available that I am publishing at: https://grabcad.com/tutorials/creativity-in-engineering-part-4-cpdc-results.
I am not saying that this is a solution or a highly significant action but symbolically I consider it important. If you share this vision, I ask you to support my students as some notable GC users have already done through their likes and comments. For any of them, receiving a comment or a like from someone they don't know but whom they can admire through their work in GC, implies enormous motivation. Maybe for you it is a small gesture of approval, but believe me: it is very significant.
Thank you so much!
Marcelo
A new challenge, open to the entire GrabCAD community, continues previous work:
We hope that GrabCAD users, enthusiasts of design challenges, will join us with their proposals and together we will learn something more about good conceptual design practices.
I remind you of the usefulness of low-definition functional sketches as agile tools to generate and evaluate ideas with an increasing degree of definition.
We have the model https://grabcad.com/library/the-sphere-ii-1 that shows a very low level of definition (although not the lowest possible) and allows us to approximately quantify the Desired Useful Effect for the system.
Now I have added the model https://grabcad.com/library/the-spherre-iii-1 which has a higher level of definition (although it is not the maximum possible for conceptual engineering purposes) that allows ideas to be refined and the Desired Useful Effect.
I hope everyone can apply these concepts to the ongoing challenge.
Kind regards!
Marcelo
PS: I may soon be able to add the "Sphere I" model to further illustrate the range of definitions of the aforementioned sketches.
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