Hello All,

I am looking for some real world projects for my Engineering Drafting & Design students. Does anyone have any projects that will include research, computations, analysis and modeling? These can be projects that you released several years ago, are not going to work on, or you just find them cool.

Also I am working on a semester long project like a go-kart, alternative fuel vehicle, robot, etc… that will cover the many different tools of SolidWorks as well as get them working together in teams to get the project done.

Anyhow, all of these project my students are responsible for presenting the project specifications (Customer Market, size, weight, movement…) to the rest of the class and ask the audience for ideas (Brainstorming). Then they will begin their designs with periodic update presentations. Their final presentation will include their designs, testing results and hopefully if I can get some help from area manufacturers, prototypes.

Thanks!
Chris

As students go through our CAD courses here at NTI they should remember that CAD terminology does not fly with other members of an organization.  The CAD industry has done a very poor job in standarizing its language so that marketing, managers, human resources, etc… can understand what CAD users are talking about.  This limits communication that is vital to successful project/product launches or even the hiring of useful staff to an organization.

To that end CAD users must remember that they have gone through extensive training to understand the CAD tools they use day in and day out.  The rest of the organization has not.  When it becomes time to discuss projects, issues or even what they are working on leave the CAD terms at the door. 

 Terms I am refering to are, but not limited to: any name given to a particular CAD function (Loft, sweep,…),  any term used to describe the interface (feature manager tree, graphics interface,…) so on and so forth. 

 CAD users must speak to others in the organization at their level.  When discussing a “Lofted Feature” break this down to it’s primary components; maybe something like “…this feature is a blending that starts as a rectangular shape that tranistions to a circular shape to provide…”.  this is much easier for the non-CAD users to digest than, “…here I LOFTED a rectangular profile to a circular profile…”  here a non-CAD user might think you are talking about the shape of a room (Loft).

 More to come…..

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