foolfillment: the blog

I’ll admit I was flagging a bit by this stage after a very hectc morning, I’m not even sure it that was his name - apologies if I’ve got it wrong!

John’s background (if that is his name) is mainly in teaching, he has been using parametric software since the early 80s. He now works with PTC in rolling out their Pro\Engineer software into Scottish schools.

Recently Pro\Desktop kind of ran out of steam. Now the big push is to get it’s big brother into schools, although John began by saying despite his PTC allegiance that he doesn’t care what software gets used - it’s the design skills that are important.

This presentation was more an overview of what PTC can offer and examples of work done with Pro\Engineer, it sounded as though the slides had been put together by PTC for anyone to present, as a sales pitch. John’s dialogue though made it more interesting.

A couple of key points he made:

Why aren’t we using Computer Aided Manufacture in Scottish schools? This was a point that made itself during Steve Stott’s presentation.

Indonesia are putting huge resources into their schools, they aim to be producing the best engineers in the world so they are putting in fabulous resources like rapid prototypers and lots of fancy software into every school, are we going to be overtaken?. I don’t know enough about what they’re doing, but as they say it’s not the tech but the teach.

I didn’t get much more than this. As I said, I was tired. ‘Diddums,’ I can hear you cry, ‘the poor student had to do some work.’ You’re perfectly right of course.