I spent a few hours in a workshop yesterday with John Helfen and Guillermo Melantoni from Autodesk. These gentlemen are members of the team responsible for Tinkercad, and one of their topics was about helping kids (and teachers) make the transition from Tinkercad to Fusion 360. With the recent loss of Autodesk 123D Design (and 123D Make) I have been struggling to figure out the path I would lead my students at YML and Pine Crest on with CAD software. The fewer software packages kids need to learn, and I need to support, the better, and Tinkercad is quite adept at creating complex projects, but it doesn’t do everything. As their skills grow, my middle school kids need more power.
Watching John quickly create a few objects in Fusion, and showing the similarities with Tinkercad (and 123D) put me a little more at ease. I think that by grade 6 or 7, kids can make the transition to at least make the same things in Fusion that they could in Tinkercad, and that would be my first step in transitioning. Now I just need to dig in and use Fusion myself to figure out where to go from there.
Before we left, Guillermo gave us a preview into new features coming soon to Tinkercad. Wow! They have some pretty great stuff coming soon! We promised not to tell, but my students who love creating with Tinkercad are going to love it even more, and I’m already re-thinking how to improve existing projects with the new tools.
Kris Swanson dot Blog 