First day of class: "Your team gets $50 and an Arduino, build anything!"
That set the stage for my first-ever engineering project at Columbia. I had never even touched CAD before, but I saw it as a learning opportunity and approached it with a can-do attitude. I aimed high and encouraged my team to go the ambitious route of building a fully-playable tabletop claw machine.
I headed the design, manufacturing, and coding on the technical side while managing our progress by creating spreadsheets to track deadlines and deliverables.
We had to get creative in light of our budget constraint, so we worked as a team to identify hurdles and brainstorm innovative design and software solutions rather than buying our way out of challenges. I then translated our ideas from whiteboard drawings and napkin math to 3D CAD models using SolidWorks, incorporating everyone's inputs and learning as I learn best--by doing.
All components were then 3D printed or laser cut, allowing us to prototype and iterate cheaply and efficiently.
The project was a resounding success. It was a crowd favorite at the expo and rated best in the class by the professor. In fact, it's still being used as an example to inspire prospective and current students of the class to this day!
Just as importantly, getting my feet wet in CAD equipped me with skills I now can't imagine going even a day without and made the rest of these projects possible.
