Autodesk Inventor QuickStart Program 2016

By Bobby Li

This year Research Platforms Services continued their support of the Autodesk Inventor QuickStart program which is an initiative run by a small team of students from within the mechanical community within the Melbourne School of Engineering. The program, initiated by Dr. Colin Burvill, aims to give participants a quick and easy way to start using computer-aided design (CAD) tools.

The program was run over a five-week period  August and September, where each week there would be two one-hour sessions to introduce new CAD concepts every week. It was an excellent program that did extremely well, bringing in an overall 160 participants from a number of different engineering fields, ranging from mechanical, electrical, and environments.

The QuickStart Team:

The team was comprised of eight post-graduate students who had all just undergone a two-day intensive introductory CAD training session themselves, held on the 29th-30th June.

This is one of the biggest Autodesk Inventor training workshops that we run at the University, with around 40 engineering students in attendance to learn essential CAD skills that is crucial in helping them complete their capstone projects, and coursework in the latter half of the year.

From here, our eight students were given formal training in both the CAD content and teaching skills, which even included becoming classroom helpers in another one of our full two-day introduction to CAD workshop on the 29th-30th July.

The QuickStart Program:

Across the five weeks, the team was divided so that could all lead their own sessions - each session would be structured so that there would be a lead demonstrator and an assisting demonstrator.

The beauty of the QuickStart program was that it was students teaching other students and sharing their CAD knowledge with the wider engineering community - if we didn’t know the answer to some of the questions, no problem! We worked together to figure it out, an important aspect of any community-driven program.

Overall, a fantastic initiative to ease students into becoming proficient CAD users. We had many students returning week after week eager to continue developing their skills, as well as building the confidence in our demonstrators as they became more effective teachers with each passing week.

We are extremely happy that many of you found this program helpful - the comments we received were positive and endearing. If you only found out about this just now, or couldn’t participate this year, we hope to see you at one of our trainings or next year’s QuickStart Program as we continue growing this program and community in future years.