Week 0 Recipe: Self-Leveling Zen Garden

Step 1: Begin with a sketch. Before opening any software, I drew out what I wanted the final product to look like — a self-leveling zen garden the size of a sandbox. While small robotic zen gardens exist, I wanted to imagine one large enough to rake with both hands.

Step 2: Move from paper to pixels. I entered Onshape and started designing a smaller-scale rake model using inches rather than feet. The idea is that the final rake will be scaled up by a factor of 12 in each dimension.

Step 3: Reflect and taste-test your results. Learning 3D design felt like learning a new recipe — confusing at first, but incredibly satisfying once it came together. Rotating the final model in Onshape made it feel real, even though it was still just pixels on a screen.