SolidProfessor July Newsletter: Keeping Students Creative (Plus New Inventor, Meshmixer, and Matlab Content!)
As you start preparing for next school year, I thought I’d share an interesting TED Talk about the importance of creativity in education for some inspiration. In addition, you’ll also find information about our new 2017 Inventor Advanced Assemblies course and Inventor Supplemental Materials. Read more below!
— Megan Davidson Director of Customer Success
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original”
Listen to one of the most popular TED Talks about the importance of creativity
In this 2006 TED Talk, speaker Sir Ken Robinson describes the importance of creativity in education and in the economy. He states that “creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” After all, we’re educating today’s students to contribute to a work force many years in the future – today’s students won’t retire until 2075! Far from just teaching students where to point and click in the software you’re using, you’re teaching them design principles and inspiring their ideas so that they can propose new and unique solutions, like this student who modeled his teeth and created his own braces via 3D printing technology.
As you and your students start working on interesting problems and projects, tell us about it so we can share their success with the SolidProfessor community!
New Content for Inventor
We updated our Advanced Assemblies and added supplemental modeling materials
With the arrival of 2017 Inventor software, we’re updating a number of our courses, and we’ve just released Inventor Advanced Assemblies. Major topics include:
- Top-Down Assembly Design: enables designers to design components within the context of other components in the assembly to form tight parametric relationships.
- Advanced Assembly Constraints: simulate the motion of components and troubleshoot constraints when they have conflicts or errors (a common problem when working in complex assemblies).
- Assembly Features and Patterns: provide ways for designers to add features, such as cutouts to multiple components after they are assembled together, and replicate components that have multiple instances with an assembly design, such as screws and fasteners.
- Representations: enable designers to create alternate versions of their assemblies for visibility purposes, such as Exploded views and Hiding and Showing particular components or details of the design.
In addition to the updated course, we also have new hands-on materials for Inventor to give students additional practice. With their detailed, explicit instructions and included coaching video that helps students correct their own work, our current hands-on exercises are best used as “guided practice” to help students start to employ the techniques they learned about in the lecture lessons. To give your students more opportunities to practice independently, we created Inventor Supplemental Materials. You’ll find completed models from Inventor courses in the Library to help you check students’ work as well as new exercises for additional practice or assessments. We can’t wait to hear what you think!
Same Course, New Name!
We have renamed SOLIDWORKS 101-Academic to make its contents and objective clearer
By and large, the majority of instructors in the SolidProfessor community are preparing their students for certification. Those preparing their students for the CSWA have most often use our SOLIDWORKS 101-Academic course. This course offers a few advantages over our other introductory course SOLIDWORKS for Beginners:
- Designed to take beginning students all the way up to certification-ready levels.
- Contains not only all lessons from SOLIDWORKS for Beginners but also SimulationXpress and CSWA Prep courses.
- Does NOT contain part files – students get extra practice by following along with the lessons and creating parts and assemblies on their own.
To make the objective of this course more clear, it now appears in your Library as Suggested Outline: Beginner to Certification. If you have any questions about this change or the course itself, just let me know!
Meshmixer and Matlab: Coming Soon
Several Meshmixer and Matlab courses are in the works
We’re wrapping up Autodesk Meshmixer courses, and they’ll be available in the next month or so (let us know if you’d like us to add them to your account – no cost!). The first two courses to arrive will be Introduction to Meshmixer and Meshmixer Essentials.
We also have Matlab content currently in production. We’ll keep you updated as we get closer to a release date. If you have any questions about these courses, please reach out!
Starting 2016-2017 School Year
It’s coming!
We’re just a few weeks away from the start of the 2016-2017 school year, and we couldn’t be more excited to spend another year with you! As you prepare, please let us know if you have questions about:
- Enrolling students
- Editing assignments (or creating new ones!), especially if you’re installing new software
- Using SolidProfessor with your LMS
- Pricing or getting a quote
We’re happy to help – just let us know what you need!
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, I’m just a call or an email away!
Megan Davidson Director of Customer Success mdavidson@solidprofessor.com (619) 376-1451
