What Our Clients Say
Impact of SkyTOP DemosCAD on Freshmen, Continuing Students and Graduands
- Challenges of learning CAD in Campus;
Computer Aided Design (CAD) is the utilization of computer machine to augment the skill of draftsmanship ship. CAD comes on various platforms depending on the type of task to be performed; for example, Autodesk AutoCAD (Electrical, Mechanical, Civil etc), Inventor, ANSYS, Solidworks just to mention but a few. Learning these programs is accompanied by a number of varying challenges from freshmen all through to a graduand. Today we shall iteratively look at some of these challenges and how DemosCAD by SkyTOP Technologies has managed to curb some of them.
- Freshmen/New students
When a student first joins campus, he/she is green without much to base his/her arguments on. In most cases anything that the lecturer says goes as the Gospel. Add that up with strict instructions from home and you have real standup students eager to learn; or at least most of them. Too bad this is not usually the stage to be taught CAD in campus. The initial stages of manual draftsmanship ship are usually hectic with time consuming assignments as students learn to utilize manual tools to produce a not easily editable drawing. At this stage, since not much is being done along the lines of CAD, not much if any challenges exist yet. However, it would be the best time to familiarize one with CAD platforms, specifically; AutoCAD owing to the fact that it has been accepted as the basic tool for draftsmanship around the globe in institutions of higher learning and in the industry for design and production. The inadequacy of exposure and un-sequential videos on YouTube can really be a stumbling block in the process of systematic learning of any CAD software utilization.
- Continuing Students
Once a student begins with CAD in the second and third years of academic years, CAD’s necessity gradually shifts from a potential tool to achieve ‘design-wonders’ to that of actually attaining these designs through assignments. At this point guide materials are given to students in terms of voluminous handouts that in most cases are excerpts from existing Thousand plus page books.
Functionalities to be learnt at this stage are usually limited to basic CAD controls and any attempts to skip to the more complex operations are limited to one’s knowledge and resources i.e. handouts, time and finances.
With time however, if one breaks out of his/her comfort zone and actually takes a course, reads related CAD scripts and researches online for relevant videos, then he/she may rise to the heights of unraveled CAD professionalism. However, this is not usually the case thanks to;
- A feeble willpower to resist negative peer pressure and turn to lifelong learning journey.
- Tight school program can render it almost impossible to enroll for extra lectures to learn the CAD software elsewhere apart from the limiting campus curriculum.
- Even if one manages to enrolls for classes in the side, he/she will have to deal with learning basics all over again, the headache of commuting to the taken classes venue and the aforementioned pool of reference material that can be quite cumbersome to ‘dig through’.