My product is a wooden lamp, and I intend to use it as a nightlight. During our research stage, I looked up patterns such as traditional Chinese designs, circular patterns, and rose patterns, but in the end, I settled for a star-shaped design since it is the most suitable for a nightlight. I made some improvisations on the typical 5-pointed star and changed it into 8-point and 4-point stars. During my designing stage, I chose the 12*13*16 cm dimensions for my lamp, with the smallest area (12*13) as the base. One reason I chose 12*13 and not a typical 12*12 square was that I didn’t want my lamp to be completely symmetrical, which ended up turning out successfully. When the wooden prototype of my product turned out, I found that I had done the fingers incorrectly and that I had accidentally matched up two sides (on two sides, my fingers couldn’t connect). In the end, when my final wood product turned out, I found that some of the fingers were too loose, so I had to layer up some paint to make the sides thicker and use wood glue to glue them together. During the decoration stage, my idea was to spray paint the entire product black and then use the acrylic markers to outline the stars, I wasn’t able to spray paint because I didn’t know you needed to spray paint before ensembling, and by the time I found out, I’d already glued everything together. Though I wasn’t able to spray paint, I still marked my stars with acrylic marker, which turned out surprisingly good. In the end, I was pretty happy with my final product.

By doing this project, I have grown significantly in my fusion skills. For one, I was able to understand the duplicate and move functions thoroughly during this project. Because my designs on opposite sides are completely identical, the best way was to copy and paste everything, in case I got the dimensions wrong (In which I still ended up doing). One super annoying thing about Fusion was that everything was really laggy, especially when you selected everything and copy-paste them. One trick around that is actually to do the copying in lightburn when you’ve finished your designs because lightburn isn’t laggy at all (of course, you wouldn’t be able to do designing in lightburn, because lightburn doesn’t have as many functions as Fusion). One huge challenge for me was because of copy and pasting, I ended up having a bunch of designs stacked together and having to delete them one by one in lightburn.

1. What tips, tricks, and advice would you give to the incoming students?  Don’t get mad at Fusion! Fusion is always laggy, but do not lose patience and click the same action a million times. It will just make it worse, and you may end up escaping Fusion and losing all your designs.
2. Consider: what would have helped you if you knew it at the start of the course? One trouble I faced was during the decoration stage because I didn’t know you spray painted before you ensembled it, so I ended up not being able to spray paint it the color I wanted (black)
3. What would you, individually, do differently if could go back and do the class over? I would want to spray-paint my product black
4. Consider design ideas, work effort, mistakes, challenges, level of difficulty, and how you did or did not challenge yourself My designs were actually not hard, because all you had to do was make three types of stars and copy and paste them over again. But my product turned out the way I wanted it to be, so I’m still quite happy with it. The fingers didn’t challenge me as much as they did to others, so everything went quite smoothly
5. What would you (the student) want to be changed about the course so I (the teacher) can make improvements to the course? Nothing I can think of now? Because the most boring part was learning all the skills, but it is a stage we cannot skip
6. Consider the projects, how the class ran, activities during the class, what to drop, what to keep, etc. Overall I quite enjoyed it. But because all our designs had to go through a teacher, we had to do a lot of waiting.
7. Think: what would have made it better for you? If our designs were reviewed on dx, I think it would have saved some time
8. I am looking for things I can take action on so please leave out things beyond my control. OK

Inquiry for Laser Cut Product Link To Photos Of My Entire Progress

~My Biggest Success was being able to create hoops with aluminum foil and find a way to attach the obstacles to the cardboard.

~My Biggest Challenge was creating the giant cardboard and trying to make it sturdy enough.

~One thing I would like to change is perhaps making the game look better visually. I would add more colors and attach the cardboard pieces to make the board sturdy on the back instead of on the front. Also, I would make the game higher quality by using hot glue instead of glue in some places.

~One piece of advice I would give to future students is not to have such high expectations on their game, it’s just cardboard made.