Dassault Systèmes and Oakland Schools Prepare Students for 21st Century Careers
400 seats of high-tech software and support made available

Dassault Systèmes recently announced the expansion of its partnership with Oakland Schools (Oakland County, Mich.) to 400 seats of DELMIA V5 digital manufacturing software, making it the company’s largest Academic Partner Program to date. The software will be made available throughout the 28 Oakland County school districts. The goal is to enlighten students to the opportunities available within the engineering and manufacturing fields through use of DS 3D design and manufacturing tools, which are implemented by every major automotive and aerospace company.

The software is provided to Oakland Schools at a fraction of its commercial market value. In addition, all the instructors – currently representing 17 high schools or technical campuses in the county -- receive a minimum of 40 hours of training, all instructional resources, training materials, and support as they become instant members of a V5 Users Group. “Dassault Systèmes’ commitment to Oakland Schools has been unparalleled,” says Dr. Bill Williams, Oakland Schools Career Focused Education consultant. “Although software is typically the most expensive part of a program like this, support and mentoring of the students is the most important component and DS shines on all fronts.“

“We feel very strongly about the benefits of a program like this,” adds DELMIA’s Roy Smolky, Worldwide Sales Operations Services & Support. “By providing students with the technical skills needed to face 21st century job demands, we also ensure the economic strength of our state by building a workforce for local companies.”

According to the National Association of Manufacturers, college degrees in engineering and science are at a fraction of what they were two decades ago while developing countries such as China, India and Russia are turning them out by the tens of thousands. American manufacturing is shifting to higher tech sectors that require greater skills than in the past.

"The importance of a skilled workforce is critical to companies like ours,” says Edward Mantey, Vice President, Engineering Design, Electronic Systems, Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing NA. “An educational program like this fills a gap by preparing students for the rigors of the workplace and by providing us trained manpower with experience in digital design and manufacturing tools."

“Oakland Schools is committed to providing state-of-the art instruction at our four Technical Campuses and supporting career technical education throughout Oakland County,” adds Dr. Vickie L. Markavitch, Superintendent, Oakland Schools. “We provide an expansive variety of options for students pursuing careers and post-secondary education after graduation. We know from experience that students who are trained in Dassault Systèmes’ tools are better prepared to enter university-level engineering programs.”

The DELMIA Academic Partner Program provides both career awareness and career preparation by offering educational institutions -- ranging from elementary schools to universities -- academic partnerships that include special licensing, purchase arrangements, and sharable resources. DELMIA currently has 70 North American academic partners, including institutions such as Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, Penn State, Purdue, Wayne State, Ohio Northern, Kettering University and the University of Alabama- Huntsville.

The next step in this technical training program, adds Williams, is to provide actual certification to students who complete the stated training requirements. “A student who can show a prospective employer or college that he is certified in DELMIA Robotics V5, for example, will have an incredible edge over the competition.”

RAND Worldwide Enhances Three CATIA V5 Training Courses

Recently RAND Worldwide announced the enhancement three of its CATIA V5 courses developed by its ASCENT – Center for Technical Knowledge® division: CATIA V5: Advanced Part Design, CATIA V5: Introduction to Surface Design, and CATIA V5: Advanced Surface Design.

“The addition of new topics and project exercises will extend our students’ capabilities with this complex software,” said Joe Oswald, Executive Vice President PLM Operations, North America and Europe, RAND Worldwide. “Many of the changes incorporated into these updated courses have come directly from our professionals working frontline with clients every day, seeing their specific challenges and identifying pertinent training topics that will advance users’ CATIA V5 knowledge and on-the-job productivity.”

The CATIA V5: Advanced Part Design and CATIA V5: Advanced Surface Design courses include RAND’s new exercise format, Project Exercises. Project Exercises provide users the opportunity to build and analyze geometry on their own based on the concepts learned throughout the course and to determine if they can meet the project design specifications provided by applying those concepts.

The CATIA V5: Advanced Part Design course introduces new concepts for working within a concurrent design environment. Users are exposed to a variety of tools to show, manage, and reuse design data to make the design process more efficient. To accommodate the additional concepts, the course length has increased from two days to three and contains six new chapters and 28 new exercises. Real-world models and processes developed through RAND’s client experiences are used in the curriculum to reinforce CATIA V5 functions and tools and provide a greater hands-on learning approach. The new chapters presented in the course focus on an introduction to automation; wireframe lines and curves; feature failure; thickness, remove, and replace face features; and analysis tools for draft, thread and tap, and parameterization.

The combination of RAND’s CATIA V5: Introduction to Surface Design and CATIA V5: Advanced Surface Design has increased from a total of three days to five. The longer course length gives CATIA V5 users the comprehensive surfacing knowledge required for complex surfacing projects. The two courses also include the following improvements:

The CATIA V5: Introduction to Surface Design course moved from a one-day class to two days and places greater emphasis on the Generative Shape Design workbench functionality in the GS1 license. The course gives students the data required to make better design intent decisions and more effectively reuse data. Surface modeling best practices are reinforced throughout the new curriculum to assist users in creating more robust and flexible surface geometry. Advanced wireframe and complex surfaces chapters have been added and expanded upon, as well as a new chapter focusing on boundary representations. In addition, 18 new exercises have been added to ensure users gain a greater understanding and retention of the concepts taught and to further support RAND’s hands-on learning approach philosophy.

The CATIA V5: Advanced Surface Design course has increased from a two-day class to three days and further extends the knowledge gained from the CATIA V5: Introduction to Surface Design course. The class uses the GSD license (formerly GS2) and contains significant enhancements intended to increase the users exposure to additional features for building more advanced and complex surface geometry. Four new chapters have been added to the course focusing on advanced surfacing projects and surface fillets, knowledge templates, and offset surfaces, as well as 28 new hands-on exercises. Continuing with the use of real-world examples, many of the new exercises provide users with strategies to manually build geometry in complex situations when expected results are not achieved. Specifically, users are presented with lessons demonstrating unexpected results and how to work around the issues presented by the resulting geometry. This includes properly using a tool, what can make a tool generate unexpected results, alternate tools that can be used to capture the necessary geometry, and alternative tool uses. The course also contains improved ReflectLine, multi-extract, blends, and sweeps content.

RAND employs 50 full-time certified instructors globally and provides extensive, high-quality professional development programs for Autodesk®, Dassault Systèmes, and PTC® software solutions. In addition to standard classroom training, RAND offers a variety of training solutions for CATIA V5 users, including customized training and development programs, a personalized learning service to provide users with a desk-side mentor, and knowledge assessment tools designed to assist CATIA V5 users to identify knowledge gaps for targeted training and improvement. In addition to its training services, RAND offers a portfolio of internally developed software products, software development, and Product Lifecycle Management consulting and implementation services. For additional information about RAND Worldwide and its training and professional services, please visit http://www.randservices.com.

VISION Grant Puts Focus on CATIA Educators, Schools and Students Reap the Rewards

The Engineering VISION Grant puts CATIA educators in the spotlight by providing them an opportunity to show what they are doing with CATIA in their classrooms. By sharing their knowledge, these educators are helping to raise the level of CATIA education across North America.

The VISION Grant was founded by ENGINEERING.com with supporting sponsorships from Dassault Systemes, IBM and Wichita State University. The goal of the grant program is to demonstrate the use of technology in the classroom to help students better understand the mechanical principles of engineering. Clearly students are the ones who benefit from this technological focus, gaining valuable insight into engineering principles, as well as practical knowledge of CATIA V5. This gives them a valuable skill in today’s job market.

Each year, ENGINEERING.com encourages educators to make a submission describing how they used CATIA V5 in their teachings, along with a description of the work and its pedagogical value. All submissions are posted online on the Engineering VISION Grant Website at www.engineeringvision.org. This site gives educators an opportunity to share their curriculum and ideas with their peers and raise their own profile and that of their school.   

The winning submission will earn a grant including a 30-seat lab of CATIA V5 for 3 years, 30 Student Versions of Abaqus (SIMULIA), 30 Wichita State University textbooks, plus a complete set for the instructor. Second and third place will receive cash awards.

The VISION Grant provides educators, schools and students a win-win-win scenario. The student receives first-rate instruction in mechanical principles and knowledge of industry leading software. The school receives the necessary tools to continue giving students this type of instruction. The educator receives the credit for a job well done.

The submission deadline for this year’s grant has been extended until February 15, 2008. Last year’s submission can be viewed on the CATIA Community Website. For more information, visit the Engineering VISION Grant Website at www.engineeringvision.org, or contact Graham Proudley by phone at (905) 273-9991 x224 or by e-mail at gproudley@engineering.com.