SolidWorks Robotics Summer School

[mplanchard]

While judging in Atlanta this year, so many students came up to me and wanted a copy of SolidWorks for their robot camps and to learn SolidWorks before college. We decided to do summer school with a free 60day download for summer outreach programs. SolidWorks had 1000's of requests last year and we wanted a faster method to process.

Also, there are high school graduates starting engineering school in the Fall. Before you take a college SolidWorks based engineering class, working through the SolidWorks tutorials will help you get a head start. Most university classes use SolidWorks as a design tool - they do not teach "CAD". You are expected to know it - just like using a calculator. To begin, Go to Help, SolidWorks Tutorials. I created movie files to help you with the first three lessons, http://www.solidworks.com/pages/prog...arnsolidworks/. Learning SolidWorks over the summer will give you a head start.

SolidWorks Corp. will support any registered team that wants to use SolidWorks software for the 2009-2010 academic year - just go to www.solidworks.com/SponsoredDesignContest and fill out the application. This will provide to a team all our 3D CAD software and engineering analysis tools for 1 year. The DVD comes in Windows XP and Vista (Ultimate and Business). 2009-2010 contains many new enhancements to help out in large assembly modeling, you can also specify design limits - such as weight in Simulation advisor (SolidWorks Simulation is the new name for COSMOSWorks), sketch a slot in one step, and Photoview 360 that creates beautiful photorealistic images - very quickly.

In addition, you will be able to downlown the new Add-In, SolidWorks SustainablityXpress from http://labs.solidworks.com/. SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress lets you understand and improve the environmental impact of your robot designs. For engineering students, you will see more courses in Life Cycle Assessment and environmental impact. As a young product designer, you have a great influence on selecting the materials and manufacturing processes. All design will be sustainable design.

Marie