CAD Students "Pass Go"

John LeComte, Jacobus Overgaag, Eric McGovern, and Cam McDonough with the FIFA Monopoly game they designed and built in their Advanced CAD class at Melrose High School.

Monopoly has been around in various forms and editions for more than a century. After nearly a year of COVID-induced delays, four Melrose High School students, using tools and equipment funded in part by the Melrose Education Foundation, finished creating their version of the ever-popular board game: FIFA Monopoly. 

John LeComte, Cam McDonough, Eric McGovern, and Jacobus Overgaag designed and built the game board and pieces in their Advanced CAD (Computer-Aided Design) class. On the custom FIFA (the international body of professional soccer players and teams) Monopoly board, the properties are soccer players ranked by ability, so that Park Place and Broadway are Ronaldo and Messi, which will make sense to fans of international soccer! In addition to the board, the students also created pawns, player/property cards, and custom risk and chance cards.

“When Mrs. G introduced this project to us, we knew that we wanted to do something related to soccer,” said McDonough. “We’d seen wooden Monopoly boards, so we figured we would design our own. The ideas snowballed as we went. Every day, we added more custom features to the game. It became a much bigger project than any of us imagined.”

Betsy Giovanardi, the CAD, Engineering and Architecture teacher at Melrose High School, concurred. “I’ve seen some impressive projects over the years, but this one was the most challenging and complex,” said ‘Mrs. G.’ “These students put an incredible amount of time and effort into it.”

What she admired most about her students throughout this project was their perseverance. 

“It took them months to design and manufacture this game, and they never gave up, even when they hit a roadblock,” she said.

And there were plenty of roadblocks, the biggest one being COVID. On Friday, March 13, 2020, after months of preparation, the students finally were ready to hit the “start” button on the machine that would carve their game board. Unfortunately, March 13 not only was a half day, it ended up being the last day that all students attended Melrose Public Schools in person.

“It was very frustrating sitting around for the next year knowing that we were two hours away from finishing the project we had spent five months on,” McDonough said.

In January, 2021, the four students finally came back to the classroom and, at long last, transformed their FIFA Monopoly board from planning to reality. After all of the time that had elapsed and the many challenges involved in designing the board and pieces, seeing the finished product of their labors was quite rewarding.

“When we first prepared the board to be cut, the estimated cut time was well over 24 hours,” said McGovern. “It isn’t realistic to keep the machine running overnight unsupervised, so we strategically combed through the design to either make the cuts shallower or to use a larger bit. We managed to get the cut time down to six hours, which was doable in one school day.” 

During the first test cut, the bit snapped, so the next challenge the students faced was finding a softer wood than the oak plywood they’d chosen.  They selected Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF), which is softer and less likely to splinter during the carving process.

Creating the game pieces was even more difficult. After experimenting with several technology solutions, the students finally were able to carve detailed, accurate pieces using a small laser engraver—“after lots of trial and error with the cut settings”—and by choosing FIFA clubs with simple badges that didn’t have as much detail.

“I really enjoyed the creative aspect of this project,” said LeComte. “Some of our ideas were inspiring, but some didn’t match up, so we had to work as a team to make it all come together.”

Multiple grants from the Melrose Education Foundation over the past several years made this project possible, including one for the X-carve machine (“we could not have completed this project without that machine,” says Giovanardi), and one for a Prusa precision 3D printer that was crowd-sourced and managed through the Foundation.

“Experiences like this reinforce our commitment to supporting innovation and excellence in the Melrose Public Schools by providing grants that empower educators and encourage student creativity and critical thinking,” says Jessica Dugan, President of the Melrose Education Foundation Board of Directors.

“I am immensely proud of these four students,” Giovanardi says. “From the beginning, I told them that this project was a risk due to the various complicated aspects, but they accepted the challenge and persevered through every roadblock that came their way. Not only did they learn along the way, but I did too by discovering some new ways to push the limits of the tools.”

Most importantly, she says, this experience showed that, if students are allowed to choose a project, they typically find their own intrinsic motivation to succeed.

And that’s a win for any student.