Site for Secondary Students

By DE Editors

Autodesk (San Rafael, CA) unveiled a new Web site that provides free educational resources for middle- and high-school students. Teachers who join the Autodesk Student Engineering and Design Community gain access to 2D and 3D design software and other resources they can use to incorporate project-based learning into the classroom. Teacher members also can share coursework and discuss projects with other teachers.

Registered teachers can download resources such as this Inventor-based curriculum.

The new secondary community is an extension of the Autodesk Student Engineering and Design Community for post-secondary educators and students. More than 95,000 members from 82 countries have taken advantage of free product downloads and learning tools since that site launched in September 2006.

To sign up for this new community, participants can register online with a school-issued e-mail address. Students without a school-issued e-mail address can ask one of their school’s faculty members to join. The faculty member can then authorize access for participating students without a school-issued e-mail address.

“Teachers’ jobs are hard enough without having to learn new technology, which can be intimidating,” said Paul Mailhot, senior director of worldwide education programs at Autodesk. “Autodesk hopes this community will develop into a support network for teachers, where they can explore resource materials and connect with peers to share teaching tips, such as how to keep kids motivated and engaged in the classroom. We also designed the site to make learning new software less challenging, so teachers can focus on what really counts in the classroom—teaching.”

The site will also support a number of initiatives designed to increase student interest in math, science, technology, and engineering. Project Lead the Way is a national pre-engineering program that offers pre-engineering and science curricula for middle- and high-school students. FIRST Robotics is an annual competition in which student teams design robots that perform specified tasks.