foolfillment: the blog

Update: I’ve re-written this post for the new school year. There hasn’t been much of a change but you might find it more useful to read the new version here.

The nice folks at software company Autodesk have kindly set up a great area on their website where people involved in education can download their software for free. In this post I outline how school pupils and teachers can download software. All you need is:

* A pc or laptop Click here for system requirements
* A broadband connection
* A School e-mail address (either a pupil or teacher e-mail address will do)

First go to the registration page for Autodesk’s Student community. When the page opens you will need to complete all of the required fields.

Important: At this stage you will need to enter your school e-mail address and also create a username and password. You should also enter an e-mail address in the ‘preferred e-mail’ field that you can access from home. All future correspondence will be forwarded to both addresses, using both means you can download the software at home.

Autodesk will now send you a verification e-mail. All you need to do is open the e-mail and click on the link to verify your account.

Now go to the Autodesk Student Community homepage and use your new login details to access the student community.

Once you have successfully logged in go to the software downloads tab and choose Autodesk Inventor Professional 2009(English) from the dropdown menu. Then hit the download button.

There are a few download options but I would strongly recommend that you choose to DOWNLOAD USING THE AUTODESK STUDENT COMMUNITY DOWNLOADER. You will now be faced with a dialog box, select ’save file’ make sure you save it to a location on your PC where you can easily find it.

Once the download tool has been saved on your PC you are now ready to install it. It should only take a few minutes to install, once installed open it up and log in.
Finally, reselect the program you want to download (Inventor 2008) and the download will begin. The download tool will also display your serial number at this stage. Make sure you record it so that you can insert it at the required stage of installation.

The files to download are quite large but it will happily run if you leave it overnight – just remember to make sure your PC won’t go into hibernation.

Once it has downloaded simply follow the on screen installation instructions, there are a few important things to note though:

During the configuration stage of installation make sure you change the units from inches to mm and choose ISO for the default setup.

If you are having any problems with this process then please feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email. I have to give credit to Robert Clements for this post, he wrote it originally a few weeks ago, but I’ve made a few changes and posted it here because it’s pretty useful.

Ewan bookmarked a link to some Escher inspired Lego models today which I enjoyed looking at and reading about, I found my way from there to the official Escher website which features fly-throughs of some of his work.

It got me thinking…

How long would it take a pupil to create something like the movie above? The S1s on Islay are making stuff just as good using Google Sketchup, and it took me about 2 minutes using Inventor to make the impossible triangle below, so, who’s up for the challenge?

Chris Munro is a teaching fellow at the Aberdeen University Faculty of Education, involved with their equivalent of Glasgow Uni’s BTechEd. Until fairly recently he was still teaching in tech departments, he is also involved with the SQA.

I think time was getting a little tight so not the presentation it might have been.

The majority of the presentation was an overview of how Inventor and other modelling software can be used with the Product Design course. He worked through the three units and referenced the work he was showing against the Arrangement Documents. Starting off by explaining that when the course was being put together initially there was a vocal minority who wanted to make 3D modelling a much bigger part of the course than it is, they were challenged by the majority, including those representing industry. This formed the basis for his presentation – that Product Design has to be about creative design and not using fancy tools to create good presentation images.

Some of his examples of pupil work showed this brilliantly, the one that stood out to me was a sofa that had been sketched by hand, had gone through a reasonable design process, but in the final sheet of images the sofa bore very little resemblance to their other designs – presumably because they didn’t have the skills to model it as they had designed it. Somewhere along the way they or their teacher had decided that they should put in some 3d modelling because it would get them marks. It didn’t.

I don’t actually have much more to say than that, the overall presentation was pretty good – it’s nice to hear how the course was dreamt up and then to see how other teachers have interpreted the Arrangements. It was particularly useful for me as I’ve never had the chance to see Product Design being taught, it’s a big gap in my knowledge – possibly to change soon…

I didn’t take any notes for this presentation, so I’m relying on my memory and the over-riding thought is that it was fairly positive about the future by showing how not to do the course – the main point being to consider using 3D modelling to add worth to the designs rather than using it just because it’s there, I’d love to hear what other people thought.

I don’t want to make a habit of these short posts so I’ll try to make this the last.
I found out my school today – Ross High in Tranent. I’ll not say any more than that for now, I’m hoping to manage a visit on Monday and after that I’ll maybe have a firmer idea of what I’ll be teaching next year and how much blogging I’ll be able to get in. Afterwards I’m planning to make it along to the next edubuzz open meeting.

On an unrelated note I was at uni today for a session on Inspiring Creativity and Design with 3D Modelling, I’m going to try to write up some of the presentations here soon but it’s looking like I’ll be bust for the next wee while. I will really have to nag Eddie Mack (one of my lecturers and the organiser of today’s event) to get around to putting his presentation online using youTube and technobuzz.