Inventor or Creo?

[kgargiulo]

Fair point. I should have inserted my breath holding comment after Autodesk which is what I was thinking in my head but didn't write.

The same comment I made about the benefits of having both Inventor and Creo experience applies across all CAD and data management software. The more experience the students get the more they form their own opinion and are better prepared for a STEM career.

I'm not an expert in PDMWorks, but I think it is a client/server application that the team has to install and maintain on each computer and the local vault, right? That would imply local hardware costs or at least the cost of the team's time to do installs and updates on every computer and the server. If it is web-based then this wouldn't apply, I'm just not sure.

We find our school's lockdown control over their computer systems means we stay away from as many installs as possible. Windchill is a website. No install, no maintenance, no local hardware costs, so it works great for us. That's my opinion, others may not have similar challenges to avoid.

Creo can import, open, change, etc. native SolidWorks (and many other CAD) files and manage them in Windchill too. So a single team could have some students using Inventor, Creo, and Solidworks, manage it all in Windchill, and have a top level assembly that puts all of that content together.

That is another example of good prep for real world. Sure, most companies standardize on one CAD or another. But companies have supply chains and customers and unless you have the weight of an Intel or Cat (both Creo) you can't dictate CAD format to your suppliers or customers (e.g. if you're building for the Army they're probably demanding Creo files and you can't negotiate that). In any engineering job you have to deal with some design content coming in formats other than your company's CAD standard, so it would be great if we exposed our FIRST teams to that as well.

I would do it in a non-build season project though. There's no need for artificial complexity, we all have enough going on in build season without inventing challenges even they are good lessons to teach.

Keith