Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Learning MAYA, Alias, and Pro/E together

There are many programs available to help someone get a product from an idea to reality. From MAYA, Alias, Unigraphics, Solidworks and Pro/Engineer Wildfire. Learning to use the strengths of each program can be a lot of fun and help get projects to run quick and easy from a dream to a product in your hands. We offer mnay classes and can help some one learn how to move from one program to another. Taking a free form part modeled in Alias and bringing it into Pro/Engineer to be placed in a working linkage system works well. Afterwords, you can render the parts in MAYA to make them look real, and then use Photoshop or something else to place those renderings in an enviroment to show to possible investors or others who might want to see your work. If learning some of these techniques is something you may be interested in, please let us here at ProETools.com know and we'd be happy to work with you. Thanks for your time.
~Bart

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Learning Pro/E

Lots of people want to know the best way to learn Pro/E. There are some ways that are more successful than others. Anyone can read through a book and mimic tutorials, but that will never get them to the range of "advanced to expert" users. Through the last few years, I've payed attention to those of my sudents who have excelled faster than others, noticed a few things and applied them to my classes;

1 The students who have excelled the fastest were the ones that were allowed to struggle. Due to our class size of around 4 students per instructor, there is always some one ready and waiting to assist. The best way for this to be leveraged to the student's advantage is let them struggle right up to the point of frusteration, and then help them just before they get upset. This way, when they figure things out on their own, it makes that small victory so much sweeter! However, it is important to not let the students get frusterated because their learning curve drops to zero when they are not having fun. This requires a watchful and attentive eye from the instructor with out hovering over the student and making them uncomfortable.

2 Having fun keeps students excited and on task. Letting students model objects they want to makes sure they are enjoying what they are doing and makes sure our school is not just feeding them canned tutorials.

3 Healthy competition between students keeps them learning at a fast rate. Getting the students to race through projects while helping each other out is fantastic for fast learning and having the material stick in their heads. Teaching each other tricks and working together to trouble shoot problems really helps the learning process.

Those are some of the principals that Design Engine Education uses to help us push our students to be the best. There are more specfic things as well, such as the progresion of learning the program, that Design Engine uses to teach Pro/E. Stop on by to learn with us! Check our website at ProETools.com

~Bart

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Pro/E Training Chicago

I manage a company in Chicago that specializes in "Product Design Training" The tool that we use most often to teach this is Pro/Engineer. We can also teach product design with other tools like Alias, SolidWorks and Rhino. Many of our students like to learn useing Pro/E because it makes them very marketable, as lots of companies use Pro/E and there is a large demand for it. Many of our Industrial Design students come here to learn usign Alias. We also have a large Corporate client base that comes to us for training on these software packages. Check out our website at: ProETools.com to see if we can do anything for you.