By Sophia Baragatti & Majdoleen Al-Jame
The ITKAN + Ma'ruf Robotics Camp traded screwdrivers for sketch tools this week. After weeks spent building, the Ma'ruf community's refugee students sat down to learn why engineers design on screen long before they ever touch a part, covering sketching, dimensioning, and how a digital model eventually becomes a physical print.
Onshape was the tool of choice, and for most students, it was their first time inside real CAD software. They built sketches from scratch, dimensioned them, and pushed them into simple 3D models. By the end of the day, every student walked away having designed a robot part of their own, the same category of component used on ITKAN's competition robots.
The day closed with a simple test of what they had learned: a coffee mug. Students broke it down into basic shapes on paper first, then rebuilt it as a CAD model straight from their own sketch, a complete idea-to-design cycle finished in a single afternoon.