Hey all,
Wanted to take a moment to say a few words about the technical school I am working for.
Northwest Technical Institute is located in Eagan, MN and has been around for 50 years as a private institution. The school is constantly producing excellent talent for the Drafting/Design and CAD technologies. Students are drilled for 16 months on ANSI/ASME standards, how to research complex problem for producible solutions, and how to use SolidWorks and Pro-Engineer using best practice modeling. I am currently teaching the Advance Modeling 1, Product Design for Manufacture and Sheet metal and Weldments courses using SolidWorks.
This semester the 4th Semester instructor and I are firing up a competition project that will put the 4th semester students in the team lead position. These student will design a glider in Pro-Engineer using all the available tools they have learned to model the farthest gliding distance. They will then outsource their detailing and manufacture of the design to second semester using email to coordinate the efforts and meet the project milestones and deadlines. The 2nd semester students will need to import the por-e models into SolidWorks (mean ain’t we) and detail them using many section views and inferencing dimensioning techniques. The school has done many competions like this in the past but this will be the 1st time we have one semester coordinate with another semester. This is shaping up to be very competitive and exciting. I cannot wait to see the frustrations, the pain and finally the results from this competition.
 Anyhow, this is a brief glimpse into the school that I work at. I am always looking to those in industry that may have old project specs, ideas or info that may help to add even more realism to our curriculum so that our students are even more prepared for the industry. Also, forgot to mention, I graduated from NTI in 1997. My career has soared with their degree.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Chris MacCormack
