Rhino 101 - main points to teach

Ummm… hi. What would ya people think are the main points to teach to people who have never used the program before, and will need it to work with vectors (vinyl cutter&laser engraver/cutter) and simplified 3d models (for variety of 3d printers)?

Back when rhino 4 or 5 was taught to me, we had like 80+ hours to work with it, and no extra requirements… pass a test and get credits sorta deal. I kinda liked it back then, then had class on grasshopper and liked it even more… now, decade later, I’ve kinda found out its the easiest way to make vinyl/laser cutter to work, so at work I use rhino almost daily.

In January I accepted a job to remote-teach basics of rhino in ~32 hours. To my surprise majority of the class actually got what I tried to teach them, and thus passed the course. Some of them even bought it to work their own stuff with it… or to excitement of my teacher collegues “student x asked if they could do the task in rhino” - stuff like pattern design where arrays really help a lot.

Now I’ve got another teaching job of “the basics of rhino for product/jewelry designers, except you only have ~18 hours and should cover integration with laser/3d printing”… All I can think of is teaching them the workflows I use to work the machines; sorta, starting from UI, to curves (for vinyl/laser vectors), to simplified 3d of extruding curves, to working with 3d primals, and finally booleans etc with the 3d models. And throw save formats there somewhere…

I’m not asking if this would work… because it kinda has to (I have to ask for more teaching hours to get the group properly up to speed later :<), just wondering what would people of the community think “the most important things” they’ve learnt, before/during/after any lessons into the program. Or any other valuable points you may have.

I would suggest your browse through the Level 1 Training Guide.
That is what we teach to beginning Rhino users:
http://docs.mcneel.com/rhino/6/training-level1/en-us/Default.htm