[rees2001]

Our team has been using Inventor for a few years now and it has made the construction of the robot pretty nice. We are a Project Lead The Way school and have Inventor on every computer in our tech wing. Our school's IT people set up a shared drive that all of the students on the team can access. We just have to supply them with the student login information. We set up a folder and a project file (this is fairly important for assemblies) for saving parts and assemblies. Almost all of the students on our build team have had a class or 2 or 3 with Inventor so teaching isn't an issue. We construct the entire robot first in Inventor & then build. Some parts are built before the entire assembly is complete but the final frame isn't cut until all subassemblies are complete and put with the final robot.
Some problems we faced in the past:
When we worked at our sponsor's location, we had issues that we only had a few computers to work on. It became difficult to transfer files, and give each sub-team enough time to work on their designs. Now we have over 100 computers to use so it is not a problem.
A few years ago we didn't set up the Project File and our assemblies got all messed up.
Occasionally some students will save work to their own network drive and forget to put it on the shared drive. This wasn't a huge problem because Teachers can access student files and it was just a little more work for me to go and get the files for the other sub-teams.
Oddly enough we have never submitted a robot for the Autodesk award. It doesn't seem like it would be a stretch for us we just haven't done it. It can be something new for this year.