[Tristan Lall]

I've learned Pro/E, Inventor, SolidWorks and AutoCAD, and have used them all for significant projects in industry (as well as Pro/E and Inventor in FIRST). However, I'm a little out of practice with the latest versions, so maybe things have changed.

I still like Pro/E* the best, but you've got to be a bit of a perfectionist and quite industrious to make it really work nicely. When it's configured well, though, it's great. I love the responsiveness of the Pro/E sketcher compared to the others. But it has a bit of a mean streak—regeneration will always fail at inopportune times, and early datecodes of every version tend to crash suddenly—which may be a negative for teaching purposes. Pro/E integrates well with Windchill (version control), but in my experience, I'm the only one who bothered to try to figure it out. (And I was actually quite disappointed with the Windchill web interface. Lots of potential, but full of awful UI and, at least on the free PTC-hosted server for FIRST teams, exceedingly, unusably slow.) I don't think it's really too difficult to learn Pro/E; it didn't take me long at all, back in 2003.

I never really liked Inventor. I could deal with it, but its interface was always counterintuitive, and like Cory said, it takes way more clicks to do things. It was a resource hog when I last used it regularly (but that was about six years ago). Vault version control sucked; I thought they'd replaced it, but I don't know with what.

SolidWorks was always decent. It's probably the most marketable as a job skill these days, in small and medium engineering businesses at least. They always struck me as the most willing to create a product that's great for engineering schools, and presumably great for high schools too. If you're worried about Pro/E, then this is the CAD software for you.

AutoCAD is not the way to go, unless all you want it for is toolpaths. It can do much more of course—but it's just not worth the aggravation.

In any case, they're all free to FIRST teams (and university students), so that part of the decision is easy.

*I still can't get used to "Creo". It seemed like a strange marketing move, throwing away name recognition...but maybe they wanted to shed the "hard to use" stigma.