Sarah Fisher
It’s that time of year where leaves turn and the motivation to finish out the semester inevitably goes into early hibernation for the winter. Adding the complexities of online or hybrid learning, students are facing real barriers to remaining engaged with their schoolwork as the semester winds down.
This makes it more important than ever for educators to attune to their students’ needs, creating new ways to inspire and motivate. To that end, we’ve developed a ready-to-use contest toolkit for CNC machining and machining technology courses to foster student engagement and career preparation. Using these contests, colleges like Ivy Tech and Diablo Valley have successfully walked the line between maintaining academic routine and implementing out-of-the-box learning experiences during the global pandemic.
The Contest-in-a-Box toolkit offers educators a one-stop-shop for facilitating contests in the classroom. This might be the exact thing you’ve been looking for to shake up how your students learn—and invite them to play their way into learning.
When Contests and Classrooms Collide
Contests-in-a-box are a great way for students to learn fundamental concepts in CAD, CAM, and CNC technology while collaborating and competing with fellow learners. The supporting documents and guides give clear instructions on how to take your students from concept to contest in one fell swoop.
As you near the end of the semester, consider incorporating contests into your classroom in the following ways:
- Create a contest as a fun end-of-year project before the break. Have your students post their progress on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and invite them to tag us #AutodeskEDU so we can cheer them on.
- Or to kick off a great spring semester, have a contest ready for when your students return. The kit has everything you need to plug into your curriculum, for an easy, fun activity.
What’s included?
Contest-in-a-Box toolkits provide everything you need to facilitate a CAD, CAM, or CNC machining contest in the classroom: supporting documents, guides, and CAD files to help lay the groundwork. Introducing a new way of engaging with course material can help motivate students to learn while through low-stakes competition.
Experiential learning can also be a great way to ingrain course material in a student’s skillset. To further support the contest material, you might also consider exploring Autodesk’s CAM programming and CNC machining self-paced courses and curricula. This way, students can apply theory they’ve learned in the classroom to real-world activities in a contest format. And because we refresh our contest content frequently, you’ll have access to a variety of CAD, CAM, and CNC material to inspire innovation in your students.
