For now, I just wanted to describe a little bit of the learning curve and the process from the way I see it. I've never done ANY 3D design before, except for one night that I played around with Blender but was too exhausted and wound up taking a nice nap.
Maya or Blender... One requires a license (they have a free student license valid for one year), the other open source. They do some of the same things in different ways. Only the interface is really different. I'll give it to Blender here though, much sexier.
Anyway, my first homework was to model a set of binoculars. I wound up choosing these - they seemed to be the simplest I could find. 
The overall objective of the homework was to get used to navigating through the view and be able to create and modify polygons using move, scale, and rotate while only using polygons. Overall, a good exercise - mostly because Maya has SO MANY FEATURES that its incredibly overwhelming and even doing basic things feels like you might break something.
Here's what I did:
I wanted to design half so I could just copy and paste the other half. Note to self: Finish the first half COMPLETELY BEFORE making the second half.
I just grabbed a cone for the scope, scaled it down. Made the grip section by using a pipe and stretching it along the x-axis. Made the eye hole thing with a scaled down cylinder, and just kept duplicating and rescaling the ridges along the eye hole. The whole exercise was pretty much the same thing: create a polygon, move, scale, rotate.
2nd save: Stupid me duplicated the whole thing and then repositioned the second half of the binoculars. I added a lens by just using a sphere, scaling it so the sphere was really thin.
Here I fixed the lens section. I was originally only using the cone, and put the lens (sphere) in the cone, but I needed to add an extra ridge so I used a pipe, set the thickness (in the attributes section) and then repositioned the sphere inside there. I added the bridge between both grips. Here I started getting pretty comfortable with Maya's interface. To make the bridge, I took a cube, made it big enough to intersect with both grip sections, created a cylinder and used the boolean difference to cut out the bottom of the bridge to make it look curved. Used another cylinder for the rod socket piece. I did the same thing for the bridge between the actual scope.
I found out about extrude and selecting faces and vertices and stuff.
One of the things I didn't realize in my design was that the cone had 20 faces, making it appear kind of blocky in the previous renders. When I tried to increase the number of subdivisions, the geometry of the cone just exploded so I felt it was too late to redo the cone because everything else was sized for the cone. I SHOULD HAVE just finished one complete half before doing the other half. It would have had to be a whole load of resizing for twice as many polygons because I would have to manually change both halves. So I just left it.
I used the cut faces tool to be able to separate the ridges in the scope cone polygon. Then used extrude to create the small ridges in the scope. I made the pipe surrounding the lens a little longer. I used extrude on the grips for the ridges and then tried to replicate the ridges to put them on the bridge between the grips.
The next thing I want to do is kind of blend the shapes together to make it look softer and less blocky. I'm sure we'll get to that this week in my class.
Overall, pretty fun, and surprisingly NOT that hard to do. Although you do have to make sure to take out a couple of hours in your day to play around with it. There's lots of basic tutorials out there that get you going from basic polygon shapes to really elaborate objects.
EDIT: Here are the binoculars with a clay render that looks pretty cool.
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