Teaching resources and software provide improved charting and materials selection, tools to study manufacturing, Windows® 10 and touch screen support.
Granta Design announced today the release of CES EduPack™ 2016, the latest version of the leading materials education resource, which is used at more than a thousand universities and colleges worldwide.
The 2016 release features enhancements and resources to get students up-to-speed even faster, enabling them to engage with the world of materials. New charting and graphical tools, more sophisticated materials selection, a new tool to study manufacturing cost, and extensive data to support real case studies all make it easier to deliver lectures and projects that help students to dig deep into materials and their applications as they progress through courses in engineering, science, and design.
CES EduPack supports materials teaching from a pre-university level to advanced teaching at a graduate level. In response to feedback from educators, it is updated every year with new and improved features. Open development and customer testing are vital elements for the continuous improvement.
This year, for example, the most requested feature improvements have included upgrades to annotation and the ability to plot multiple lines on materials property charts. These, alongside other improvements, have been delivered in CES EduPack 2016, helping students to grasp key material selection concepts in class or to explain clearly decisions made in their project work. Other enhancements make it easier to work on more complex materials selection study cases, such as those with multiple constraints or competing objectives, enabling students to solve problems they might encounter in industry.
The new Part Cost Estimator helps students to think through the cost of different materials and manufacturing process choices for a product, introducing them to ideas including the effects of part size and complexity, batch size, and credits for waste recycling. This tool was developed by Granta through an industrial collaboration and adds to the rich resources in CES EduPack that help to develop key transferrable skills needed in industry.
Students can easily access a wide range of high-quality case studies and video tutorials through CES EduPack, enabling self-learning, helping them to get up-to-speed faster, or providing further stimulation for advanced students.
This latest version of CES EduPack is even more intuitive, interactive, and enjoyable to use, with new toolbars, clearer datasheets with prominent science notes, and default display settings optimized for projecting in lecture theatres. Changes to the user interface ensure that students can browse, search and select materials on tablet computers and Windows®10-enabled machines. These enhancements also mean that CES EduPack makes the most of the latest high-DPI monitors.
The new features build on CES EduPack’s existing comprehensive database of materials and process information, powerful materials property plotting tools, and a range of supporting lectures, projects, videos, exercises, and resources available in English, French, German and Spanish.
CES EduPack saves time by ensuring quick access to reliable materials data from authoritative sources, and it helps to keep courses up-to-date with access to the latest tools. These resources were developed by Professor Mike Ashby of Cambridge University, the team at Granta Design, and collaborators around the world.
The 2016 edition of the CES EduPack is easier to use and more powerful than ever. We have the academic community to thank for this: the Granta team have used feedback from educators worldwide to prioritize their work over the past year – and they have done a magnificent job. Details and demos in forthcoming webinars.
Professor Mike Ashby - Cambridge University
Visit www.grantadesign.com/events for details of upcoming webinars on CES EduPack 2016, the first of which is on January 28 with Prof Ashby.