MOOC Workbench

The FreeCAD MOOC External Workbench Icon

Overview

The MOOC Workbench is an external workbench with which you can follow interactive tutorials and make evaluation of your work directly within the FreeCAD interface. The MOOC workbench offers 2 tools: interactive tutorials and evaluations.

• Currently only in French (and hard-coded).
• Only compatible with FreeCAD Py3 and Qt5 (PySide2)
• LGPLv2 (or similar) code funded by Europe through IMT and EESAB.
• Modular: This workbench was created with the intention that the addition of tutorials and evaluations was modular. In other words, one has to add a tutorial in the lessons folder or an evaluation in the exercises folder to show up in the respective tool.

Interactive

Interactive tutorials (AKA Player) are step-by-step guided exercises with objective checks. It launches directly into FreeCAD and allows you to advance one step at a time of modeling of an object. The user has a text, a video and above all a check that the objectives have been achieved.

MOOC Player Dialog within FreeCAD GUI

MOOC Player Dialog close up

Evaluations

Evaluations (AKA Grader) consist of a small program that checks certain criteria of a FreeCAD document, for example, the presence of a part body, a sketch or the final volume.

The MOOC Grader Dialog

Installation

This workbench can be installed from the Addon Manager. For manual installation see Installing more workbenches.

Limitations

ATM this workbench is only available in the French language.

Technical Details

From a technical point of view, the workbench is composed of:

• an "API" that contains the code that analyzes the document (MoocChecker.py)
• the code that executes the tutorials in the "lessons" folder (MoocPlayer.py)
• the code that executes the evaluations in the "exercises" folder (MoocGrader.py)

Roadmap

• internationalization of the workbench
• Integration of videos in FreeCAD (PySide2.QtWebEngineWidgets?)
• request the integration of the workbench in the list of the addon manager DONE

Links

• Source code hosted on Framagit: [1]
• Official complete [2]
• Discussion threads: English / French

External workbenches

FreeCAD workbenches are easy to program in Python, there are therefore many people developing additional workbenches outside of the FreeCAD main developers.

The external workbenches page has some information and tutorials on some of them, and the FreeCAD Addons project aims at gathering them and making them easily installable from within FreeCAD.

New workbenches are in development, stay tuned!