Just yesterday, I had the pleasure of resuming a conversation with Mrs. Marie Planchard that had begun several weeks ago, in Barcelona. As you may know, Mrs. Planchard is DS SolidWorks Director of Worldwide Education Markets; in other words, she’s the one responsible for bringing SolidWorks to thousands of students all around the world. She’s also very passionate about education and irradiates that same passion and energy wherever she goes. Our conversation took place over the phone, so I’m not going to even try to quote her word by word, but rather summarize what was discussed during our chat. I hope you find this little conversation as inspiring and informative as I did.
The very first thing I asked Mrs. Planchard was how she first got involved with SolidWorks and their educational program. She told me that it all started several years ago, when SolidWorks was still a fairly new CAD software. She was teaching Pro/E at a community college in New England, trying hard to take her students from merely drafting into actually doing design, when she was approached by SolidWorks. They provided her with an evaluation copy, so she could decide whether she wanted to teach SolidWorks in her class or not. She remembers she took the copy home to play with it and, in little time that same night, she had already created her first model: a glass of wine. She became excited to realize how quickly it was to find her way around the software, and how much more intuitive it appeared when compared to Pro/E, so she decided to teach her students SolidWorks instead, although not without making sure first that her students would, indeed, be able to find great jobs among SolidWorks’s customers after completing their training. So she made the switch and she quickly realized that she had to modify her curriculum radically, because the same concepts that used to take her students a long time to grasp in Pro/E were now easily mastered in SolidWorks in next to no time. She decided then to challenge her students to put their newly learned skills to work right away and model items from real life, things they may find at home, even broken things. And she was delighted to witness what they could do with SolidWorks. Time went by and Marie not only continued to teach SolidWorks, but also became deeply involved in the SolidWorks community through user groups. It was then that, six years after her original first encounter with the software, she was asked to become Director of Education Market for SolidWorks. I wonder what took them so long!
At this point I asked Marie if she had found any sort of resistance from the college where she was teaching in order to incorporate SolidWorks into the curriculum. She told me that it was actually embraced right away, because this particular community college strived to bring to the students the latest in technology and innovation. Plus, having the commercial backup from SolidWorks was also a big help. She added that this is usually the case in many other schools all around the world. Educators and schools are usually excited to incorporate SolidWorks to their curriculum. Whenever an educator or school adopts SolidWorks, they receive not only the software, but also the whole deal with tutorials, study guides and support, to aid them in the process of teaching. These tutorials are exactly the same ones included with the commercial version of the software, and the reason for this, as Mrs. Planchard pointed out, is to give the students the best preparation possible for what they’ll encounter out there, when they go looking for a job in the industry. The curriculum and study guides provided to the educators are prepared taking into account both their particular needs in the classroom or lab and the demands of the local industry. Being an educator herself, Marie understands these needs and makes it a point to provide educational guides and resources that can be creative, challenging and affordable for both educators and students alike. As she said to me “A good engineering kit doesn’t have to be expensive. Educators use all kinds of materials that they have at hand, like balsa wood or even pasta!” Even better is the fact that these tutorials and study guides have been translated to twelve different languages, giving international students the opportunity to learn in their own language, and educators here in the States an amazing tool to approach those students that lack fluency in English. SolidWorks is also considerate of their economical limitations, and for this reason, they do not require educators or schools to be on subscription service, unless they want to offer the certification test at their site. Plus, the academic license never expires! Mrs. Planchard told me that it is not likely for schools to upgrade ever so often, because doing this would imply upgrading hardware, as well, which is prohibitive for most schools. However, even though the software changes considerably every year, the fundamentals continue to be the same, and that’s why a three or four year old edition is as valid for teaching today as a brand new one.
But what are the fundamentals? If educators can also create their own curriculum based on the needs of their local industry and/or what is familiar to them, how can you tell if a student has indeed mastered the fundamentals and is proficient with SolidWorks? Well, as Marie also pointed out, that’s why the certification process was designed for; to somehow set the standard on what the basics are that need to be known by all students and users of the software in order to call themselves proficient, not necessarily experts, but proficient in the use of SolidWorks.
So, back to my original question, it would seem like the only real obstacle there is to the adoption of SolidWorks inside the classroom in middle schools, high schools, vocational schools, community colleges and/or universities worldwide, is usually related to a more mundane problem we’re all too familiar with here in California: a small educational budget. Marie told me that, unfortunately, this is a real challenge here in the United States, because the curriculum is not the same in all schools all around the country and because the way funding for educational programs is assigned (and thus the way they decide on their software purchases) also varies from one school district to another. This is the reason why while in France 90% of public schools are teaching SolidWorks, the percentage is a lot smaller here in the United States. However, a great advantage that students have here in the United States is that they can buy the student edition for themselves or use a copy from school in their dorms or at home. Students in many other countries all around the world (most of Central and South America for instance) don’t have this advantage. In these countries, SolidWorks is usually sold to the universities and students can use it while inside the classroom, but there aren’t any distributors that can verify their student ID’s and sell them the software. This is the sad part, but hopefully it will change with time and SolidWorks will then become even more accessible to students as the demand for skilled professionals increases worldwide.
And how young is too young to be one of these “skilled professionals”, you may ask? Well, I asked Marie a similar question and she told me that, even though SolidWorks is not really contemplating ways to introduce the software to kids younger than those at middle school level, they have heard of eleven or twelve year old kids, sometimes even younger, that are using SolidWorks and creating sheet metal and plastic parts with it at their school workshop. Young minds are full of potential, full of great ideas, and SolidWorks provides them with the perfect vehicle to unleash their creativity. As Marie says “They may not know how to do it yet, but they know they can do it with SolidWorks and they are not afraid to try.”
So there you have it. We talked about a few other things, such as family, life, college memories and she even gave me some much needed career advice, but I tried to highlight what I considered most important to those that read this blog. Hope you enjoyed reading! If you are an educator using SolidWorks in your classroom, you can always find ideas and curriculum if you visit SolidWorks Teacher Blog. Also, this was not discussed during our chat, but almost everyone knows about it, so I’ll mention it here again, Mrs. Planchard and her husband had authored several excellent SolidWorks books, including a guide for the CSWA examination that I strongly recommend to those preparing for the test. So, if you are in need for a good book or text book for your class, go check them out!
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