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Next Steps

Once you have finished the main learning course projects, the path forward becomes much more open-ended. At this point, the goal is to keep practicing until the fundamentals feel natural: faster CAD workflow, cleaner parametric design, better collaboration habits, and stronger engineering judgement.

There are not specific required projects here. Treat this as a choose-your-own-adventure stage for continuing to grow.

  1. Work on your own projects and get feedback. This could be mechanisms you have not practiced yet, robots for specific games, or anything else you are interested in. Practice your workflow, make your CAD more parametric, and try new approaches. Ask for design reviews from team members, mentors, or the FRCDesign Community Discord Server. As you improve, a lot of your progress will show up as speed gains, cleaner design intent, and better load-time performance.
Tip

The design-review forum channel in the Discord server is a good place to ask for structured feedback. You can also ask for feedback on specific parts of the design if you already know what you want reviewed.

  1. Examine and learn from robot examples. Looking at other robots is one of the best learning tools available. Most mechanisms you need during a typical FRC season have already been built in some form, so study strong examples and adapt what makes sense for your own constraints. Open Alliance threads on Chief Delphi are especially useful because many teams publish design notes, build logs, and CAD.

  2. Learn more engineering design. Use the Design Handbook and the detailed breakdowns in Mechanism Examples to keep building engineering intuition. Focus on estimating forces, choosing materials, designing rigid structures, understanding common FRC parts, and learning what makes mechanisms reliable.

  3. Learn strategic design. Strategic design means setting robot priorities based on game analysis, team capability, schedule, and tradeoffs. It also means learning how to design simply and effectively. Good strategy helps decide what the robot should do before CAD decides how it should do it.

Useful strategy resources include Karthik’s Effective FIRST Strategies, Team 1678’s training material, and Team 2910’s Pop-Up Presentations. Combining strong strategy, engineering knowledge, and CAD skill gives teams a much better shot at designing effective robots.