Working under the ILLEST (Informal Linking Learning Engineering Science & Technology) Lab at the ExCITe Center, Drexel University and Dr. Kareem Edouard’s supervision, I lead the VR sneaker design curriculum.

Five years ago, I first worked with Dr. Edouard as an undergraduate research scholar, teaching high school students how to sneaker design. Half a decade later, I found myself solving a pipeline to get students from working in VR to printing and assembling shoe prototypes in a matter of 2 days.

The process started with learning Gravity Sketch, modeling shoe parts in VR, then print them out. This was a familiar process to me as a 3D modeler. The only challenge was learning the 3D printing process.

Next, I came up with a pipeline to flatten out shoe’s upper and print it out. To achieve this, I UV unwrapped the shoe part in Blender, add a reference 1×1 square inch piece, and export it to cut in the Cricut machine. I also wrote a python script to format the UV image for cricut to make the process more streamline.

After the initial test run with students, we quickly found out that students did not have the patience to learn the ins and outs of Gravity Sketch.

We simplified the curriculum so students only learn sneaker parts, creating design choices from a template of pre-made parts, and print them out. This simplified process made students more engaged and excited about the creation process.

The curriculum still has room for improvement. There are areas like material design, manufacturing, mold making, sewing, etc. that we barely touched on.

It has been a rewarding experience so far seeing the students’ eyes glow up when they successfully put together a shoe they designed. Yet, our work doesn’t end there. There are more learning opportunities through the process of creation, and as long as we can keep up the energy, we can keep learning fun and exciting.