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CES EduPack – Customer Reports and Reviews
See also: full customer list...
Reviews
CES EduPack - exciting the interest of students
Yves Brechet, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble in Advanced
Engineering Materials, "Seeing
first year students coming to your office to ask to be taught in materials selection
because last year's student told them how much they were excited by their project
is a reward than no educator can underevalue!" Read
the full article...
CES EduPack - "intuitive and delightful"
Peter Goodhew, University of
Liverpool, Materials World "A very powerful piece of educational software. There are so many aspects
of CES that are both intuitive and delightful..." Read the full article (PDF)...
Supporting textbook - Materials: Engineering, Science, Processing and Design
Fred Veer, Technical University of Delft, dc-mat newsletter "Very suitable for an introduction into the field of materials science for general engineering students". Read the full review...
What customers say
Below is a selection of customer comments and reports, divided into the
following sections:
Use in different courses - and at different levels
Introductory Materials Science
Professor Paul Predecki, University of Denver, USA,
Engineering Department "The CES package is used in an introductory
Materials Science course: ENME 2410, Materials Science I, which is
taught to all 3rd year Mechanical Engineering students and a few Physics
students… The students really like the package as do I. " Read
Professor Predecki's full report...
Successful teaching in Product Design
Chris Lefteri, Product Design, Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design, UK "This software works on all
levels, with a language and distribution of information that
suits first year degree students to highly qualified designers
and engineers. It not only provides hardcore facts and details
on materials, but also on the simple detail of providing images
of contemporary products, which exploit the specific material
properties. The software allows these design students not to
be swamped with an information overload, while at the same time
giving experienced designers a more thorough technical knowledge
and a higher level of data. This is one of the many features
which sets it apart from other material resources which can be
difficult to access on the most appropriate level. The multi-layered
information combined with the use of design references helps
to ground the materials in a living and breathing context."
Helps students with a great variety of abilities
Dr Steve Garner, Course Team Chair, Design and Designing (T211), Open University, UK, "We enrol about 400 students each year and these possess a great variety of abilities, including some who are new to using computer-based learning resources (in some cases, even new to using computers). The students have found CES to be a robust and helpful part of our teaching.
The tutors seem to be very impressed with the quality of information available and the fact that each page is very visual and approachable - vital to teaching at this novice undergraduate level. It seems well suited to the style of independent study required on OU courses. I have written a number of tutorials into our course that require students to demonstrate their growing ability to exploit the CES. Their acquired skills and knowledge with materials and processes also contribute to the end-of-course design project and so the CES has become a key component throughout the course. It's my opinion that the CES is an excellent resource for design education and I'm very happy to continue integrating it into course work at the Open University."
Visit the website of the Open University Department of Design & Innovation >>>
Teaching third-year Engineering and Aerospace Engineering
Professor Dana Elzey, University of Virginia, USA,
School of Engineering and Applied Science "CES EduPack has
been incorporated into the curriculum of ME339 which is taught
to third year engineering undergraduates, and into the third year
Aerospace Engineering option AE439. We use the CES selection software
both in the form of case studies, emphasizing a particular aspect
of material behavior, and as an aid in performance of term projects
requiring a Design study."
A postgraduate course in composite materials
Professor Jacques Courcy, University du Havre, France CES
was introduced at the University du Havre to analyze industrial projects
such as designing landing gear for a light airplane. Professor Courcy
says “I am very happy with the software and especially with
the new ideas developed by Professor Ashby. I am using CES EduPack
to teach a Postgraduate course in composite materials. The students
find these new ideas very interesting and stimulating.”
Use at a French lycee
Bernard Gilabert and Jean-Claude Tachoire, Lycee Louis Rascol, Albi — students studying for
the BTS qualification currently use CES EduPack. The software supports
teaching of material and process selection during the STS CPI and
IPM courses in industrial product design. Specifically, it enables
an industrial project at the end of the course in which students
analyze a product that is under development. The software helps students
to find the information that they need and to analyze product functionality
against technical and economic constraints. Its key advantages are
the rich and comprehensive database and the links that it makes between
information on processes and related information on materials. Examples
make it easier to study the different fields in which materials are
used, while the illustrations provide essential knowledge on processes.
The graphical tools for materials selection help to structure students’ thinking.
Information on commercial designations, producers, and equivalences
helps to resolve real design problems. Professor Ashby’s book
helps teachers to exploit the database and the software as fully
as possible.
Use across an Architecture Faculty
Fred Veer, Technical Univerity of Delft, Netherlands — The
Faculty of Architecture at the TU Delft has recently
introduced the software package CES from Granta in its
masters education. Starting from February (2007) the package
will also be used for all
freshmen’s materials science courses at this faculty. Article
on CES EduPack in the TU Delft newsletter (at tudelft.net).
Teaching Eco-Design
Ian Wilson, University of Cambridge — Final year students in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge have been using CES/EcoSelector as part of their Product Design activity.
In Product Design, the students are charged with identifying products to solve particular market needs, and come up with a range of potential solutions - which may be different molecules, formulations (recipes), devices or manufacturing processes. With carbon footprinting and green labelling appearing on more and more products in the market (and particularly supermarkets), EcoSelector offers a method for qauntifying CO2 impact which can be used in the comparsion and selection of solutions.
Three teaching levels built into the software
Professor Jacques-Eric Bidaux, HEV - Haute Ecole Valaisanne,
Switzerland "...I have been impressed by the new
version of the CES EduPack. Having different levels 1,2 and 3 was
a very good idea..."
Teaching postgraduates with “an innovative and first-class
tool”
L. Thilly, Maître de Conférences, Université de
Poitiers, France "We asked a group of students
on our Postgraduate course on engineering materials to evaluate
the CES software against three educational objectives. The first
was to make students aware of the difficult problem of material
selection, given the sheer number of available materials, and
to assess how the methodology developed by Professor Ashby (performance
indices, Ashby charts) enables us to solve this problem. The
second was to give students the opportunity to master CES, an
innovative and first-class tool, which is essential in the field
of engineering materials. The third aim was to ensure that the
experience was not lost by asking the students to write a simplified
user manual and a series of exercises for future students. All
these objectives were fulfilled. The students were helped by
the very high quality documents supplied by Granta … The
students' report highlighted the great interest in the software
not only as a reference database but also as a indispensable
industrial tool for selection of engineering materials."
Engaging and developing your students
Engages students – across course levels
Professor Stephen H. Carr, Northwestern University, USA "CES
EduPack is used extensively at Northwestern in undergraduate service
courses, upper class electives, and professional masters programs.
The reason
for
this widespread implementation is that this software is simply
the best available for making complex decisions among a large array
of possible
materials. CES engages students in rigorous analyses of desired
functions, and shows them how multiple materials properties
combine
to
provide the needed performance. CES allows students to engage in
materials selection activities in cases where this performance involves,
for
example, electrical, mechanical, and economic considerations."
Encouraging students to think
M. Collignon, Inspecteur d'Académie, Académie
de Rouen, France "There are many advantages to CES
EduPack for the students and the teachers. First, they can now
perform material and process selections, which they could not
do before. The CES software is also very educational and encourages
students to think. In some cases the constraints on the materials
are not the only thing to think about, the process or the shape
could be the most limiting factors and it is important to be able
to integrate these factors in the selection."
It makes the course a popular choice
Professor Abdelrahman Rabie of the College of
Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) at James Madison University applies CES EduPack to
support an innovative interdisciplinary program that incorporates engineering,
energy, biotech, environmental studies, information management, telecoms,
and GIS. In support of the course, each student is given a copy of
the software to use on their own computer. Such access to innovative
teaching tools, together with way in which the course was taught, has
made the course a popular choice, with students enrolling from Industrial
Arts and from the Chemistry department. Read the full report...
A positive response and enhanced understanding among
students
Dr.-Ing. Michael Schmidt-Kretschmer at the Technical
University in Berlin: "The
Engineering Design and Methodology Division has incorporated CES EduPack
into its Reverse Engineering course, receiving a very positive response
from the students. In this course a range of different products are
analyzed and the potential for improving their design is studied. Materials
selection plays a critical role in this process. The CES EduPack was
applied directly by students, without any prior knowledge of the program.
Their understanding of materials property charts was enhanced, as was
basic comprehension of materials selection."Full report in German...
A remarkable success with students
Professor Dr. Ralph Spolenak at ETH, Zurich: "In
the Summer Semester 2006 the CES EduPack was first distributed
to materials science students at the ETH Zürich. It was a remarkable
success. Not only did the students begin to solve material selection
examples unprompted, they also, independent of these excercises,
researched new materials. The in-depth background science in the
CES EduPack was particularly useful, as it enabled students to
refer to the theoretical foundations of a property directly within
the program. This contributed greatly to the learning process. The
illustrations and explanations of technical and general materials
applications are exemplary. This helped to communicate the wider role
of materials to the students. In conclusion, I can wholeheartedly
recommend the use of this software in materials science or mechanical
engineering courses." Full report in German...
Connection to real world applications
Prof. Junghyun Cho, State University of New York, USA, "The software is used by junior students in Mechanical Engineering at the State University of New York at Binghampton. Students love it and told me that it makes the course more appealing. I believe this is because the software has a design component that I can teach and that students can then implement for actual applications. Students always get excited when the topics they learn can be applied to real life."
A joy to watch the penny drop!
John Metcalf, Materials Engineering, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, "A colleague and I are responsible for teaching a Materials and Process Selection module to a large group of second year Engineering Design undergraduate students. This module would be impossible to deliver effectively without CES. Within a few sessions the students begin to get the hang of the CES suite of software and start to produce outstanding work. It's a joy to watch them when I see the penny drop as they realise what a powerful design tool CES is. For most of them this is the first time they make the connections between the materials universe, the process universe and the manufacture real products, products that that they will soon be designing in industry. For me, the assessment burden is reduced by the adoption of the varied and many examples of supplied case studies. As a relatively new lecturer the CES package has made my teaching life that little bit more enjoyable and dare I say easier!
Project-based teaching
Project-based Materials Selection course
Prof. Trevor Harding, Kettering University, MI, USA,
CES is used in a Materials and Process selection course. At Kettering,
every student must participate in an industrial co-op experience
from the freshmen through senior years, offering a realistic impression
of how industry handles product design and manufacturing. The material
and process selection course is an elective for senior engineering
students. Students seem to truly enjoy working through complex design
projects within the software. In particular, students are blown away
by the ability to model production costs, and actually go to great
lengths to investigate the influence of numbers of shifts, automation
of equipment, labor costs, etc. Read
Professor Harding's full report...
Designing a racing car for a course in Mechanical Engineering
David Browne, University College Dublin, Ireland,
Mechanical Engineering Departmentm, calls CES EduPack "the
best available computer-aided
assistance in the world". CES EduPack "uses
an ingenious graphical method to ensure that the best possible choices
of material are made for any engineering application". Students
used EduPack to select materials for a racing car. Click
here for more.
Industry-linked projects in materials and process selection
Professor Yves Brechet, Institut National Polytechnique
de Grenoble, France Professor Brechet reports that the
teaching of Materials and Process Selection at Grenoble’s
INP makes extensive use of CES EduPack. One type of project-based
course involves about 60 students from Materials Science, Mechanics
and Physics. Course material is introduced in lectures, tutorials
on CES and specialized software, and seminars from industry. The
students, organized in groups of three (drawn where possible from
different backgrounds), are given industry-derived projects related
to materials and process selection. The projects occupy one day
a week for 15 weeks, and are supervised by a university staff member
and an engineer from the industry from which the project originated.
Over five years, more than a hundred such projects have been carried
out, involving industries ranging from small to very large. More
than 80% of the projects used CES. A number of other schools in
France have either linked with the Grenoble program or instituted
similar programs of their own. These include: l'Ecole des Mines
de St. Etienne, l'INSA de Lyon, l'Université de Montpellier,
l'Ecole des Mines de Nancy, l'Ecole de Chimie de Bordeaux, l'Ecole
Centrale de Paris and l'Université de Poitiers.
Designing prototypes of real products
Professor John Ritter, University of Massachusetts, USA "We
use the CES EduPack software both in the form of case studies and
as an aid in projects requiring a design study.” Mechanical
Engineering Seniors at the University of Massachusetts do not design
and build mere widgets for their senior projects, but prototypes
of real products for real people who desperately need them Professor
Ritter says, "Students thrive on the program that is completely
independent from start to finish. They are absorbed in the analysis
and design process where CES software is employed to identify the
best material, process and overall cost of the finished product.
The final stage of the project involves constructing a prototype,
testing it in the field with the client, and then making any necessary
modifications."
Developing a materials perspective
Giving an intuitive feel for the range of materials properties
Richard Griffin, Texas A&M, USA "I like
the quantity of data and the large number of materials available.
Students can get
an intuitive
feel for the range of materials properties that different materials
exhibit. The ease with which properties can be multiplied or divided
makes it exceptionally
nice to examine combinations of properties and see, from the plots,
how the materials vary and their ranges."
Case studies are "very helpful" – they are "substantial
and reflect real life"
Professor Gérard Marot, IUT Cachan, France "The
case studies provided were very helpful in putting a course in place
very quickly. My colleagues in Mechanical Engineering are now benefiting
from a much wider range of materials. The graphical demonstrations
of the relationships between the material properties seems very important
to me and the case studies are very substantial and reflect real
life.”
EduPack teaching approach makes materials science much more relevant
Professor Norman Fleck, Cambridge University, UK,
Department of Engineering "We have completely reorganized our
Materials courses for Engineering students in Cambridge. Instead
of beginning in the old way with crystals and dislocations, we now
start our first year students with materials selection for design.
What is the best material for the forks of a bicycle?..... and so
on. This relates the basic structures and mechanics to material properties.
Having illustrated the characteristics and uses of the main classes
of materials in this way, we then spend the next two years investigating
the science behind their properties. This makes the materials science
much more relevant, and integrates our materials courses with design
teaching. We use CES to illustrate the selection process, for student
exercises and design projects throughout the four year MEng course,
and for graduate courses as well." More
on this teaching approach...
Using Ashby charts
Professor Yoshio Monma, Kochi University of Technology,
Japan Professor Monma is an enthusiastic user of CES EduPack. "Ashby
charts for deformation and fracture mechanism of various materials
is one of the favorite topics we cover in the Materials Design
course at the KUT. The CES EduPack software gives students a perspective
view of materials properties based on modern materials science."
No comparable software
Professor Bernd Oertel, Fachhochschule Schmalkalden, Germany: "I am not aware of any comparable software programs. I find both the software program and Ashby methods excellent, as I'm able to compare virtually all materials properties from every material group. This can in many cases lead to innovation through the optimal application of a material." Full report in German...
A thorough understanding of materials
Professor Jim Yedinak, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, USA, "Here at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Industrial Design Program, we strive to have our graduates leave with a portfolio that is grounded in the real world, not a collection of conceptual projects. Understanding the needs of production engineers and manufacturers allows our graduates to 'flex their muscles' as designers, and a thorough understanding of materials and processes is key. With 3,000 manufacturing materials and corresponding processes to choose from, students need an efficient tool that allows them access to structured data that guides their selection of materials for their designs, and CES EduPack provides them that tool."
Widening access with campus and enrollment
licenses
Campus-wide and enrollment licenses allow the widest possible access
to CES EduPack, including installation on students' own personal computers. More
information on licensing options...
Roll-out to 900 students
Chris Pistorius, Head of the Department of Materials Science and Metallugical Engineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa "The University of Pretoria has just purchased a five-year campus licence for CES EduPack. This purchase forms part of a strategy to improve undergraduate teaching, utilising an ad hoc grant from the Department of Education. A revised undergraduate curriculum in Engineering is being phased in from 2008, and the Department of Education grant allows specific aspects of teaching to be enhanced: in the new curriculum, CES EduPack will be used to offer tutorials in the first-year module in Materials Science. Most of the students in engineering take this module, giving a total group size of some 900 students. The Materials Science module is the first in-depth exposure to engineering for most of these students; in the new curriculum, the prescribed text will be the new Materials book by Ashby, Shercliff and Cebon, to make the most of the availability of CES EduPack. CES EduPack has been in use at Pretoria for two years now, in a module offered to third-year students in Interior Architecture; this familiarity will be used to plan the roll-out of CES EduPack to the much larger group of engineering students."
Campus-wide license extended to support international collaborations
Dr Stuart Barnes, Director of Professional Programmes at the University of Warwick notes that the university extended its campus-wide license to support teaching in an MSc in Engineering Business Management, delivered in collaboration with the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology and the Singapore Institute of Management. Dr Barnes comments "All of the participants on the programme are studying part-time and employed in various companies in Singapore (these range from aerospace to electrical component manufacturers). CES gave them a new way of looking at the materials selection and they were able to apply this to real-life examples from within their company. CES certainly improved the educational experience for them."
Piloting the software led to a campus-wide licensing
Dr Hua-Xin Peng, University of Bristol, UK "In 2005,
as part of a learning and teaching development initiative at the
University of Bristol, we evaluated the CES EduPack Design and Aerospace
Editions in the Aerospace Engineering Department of Faculty of Engineering.
The feedback from students and lecturers at the end of the academic
year 2005-6 was extremely positive, with comments including:
- I have
found the software to be highly informative as a research tool
- The software is very/extremely useful and made the understanding
of material selection to be a quick and easy process
- Easy to
use and it gives information that is very easy to comprehend quickly
- I like the way the data is presented — very clear
- Very
good when used in conjunction with the lecture notes.
As a result,
it has been decided to extend the use of the CES EduPack across
other departments through a Faculty License."
The license at the University
of Bristol's Faculty of Engineeirng uses Granta's Campus-wide license
scheme. More
on Campus-wide licensing...
You can read a report on page 10 of the Bristol Engineering Faculty newsletter for March 2007.
Students use EduPack software on their own PCs
Prof Rajesh Bhaskaran, Cornell University, USA,
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering "The enrollment
license works well for us because it allows our students to run CES
on their own computers while they are at Cornell. Anecdotal evidence
suggests that students really appreciate having the software on their
personal machines since this makes it convenient for them to access
the software."
Home-based students use EduPack software on their own PCs
Professor Stephen Kampe, Virginia Polytechnic Institute,
USA CES EduPack has been made available to home-based
students, studying the Materials Selection and Design 2nd
Year course. Professor Kampe reports that students in locations
from New Mexico to Florida each uses the EduPack software on their
own PC to help develop an understanding of the relationships between
materials properties and design, and to help them complete their
course work.
Ease-of-use and interactivity
Quick and easy to get started
Dr Ikechukwuka Oguocha, University of Saskatchewan, Canada,
Mechanical Engineering Department: "My students found CES EduPack
friendly to
use. The new interface is very simple for one to get running. After
two demos, it was quite easy for them to use CES to do a simple materials
selection project."
Students appreciate the interactive approach
Dr Carlos H. Cáceres, University of Queensland, Australia,
Department of Mining, Minerals and Materials Engineering "We have
been using
CES EduPack, and the students really appreciate the interactive approach.
The latest version of CES includes features which considerably shorten
the time required to do our analyses and enable many more materials
to be compared. Thanks to this I have been able to increase the number
of
questions solved during the semester. For certain cases the software
can also produce a sorted list of performance indices, so we don't
need to
do any calculations. The students love this!"
Much better than the "old way" – searching
multiple handbooks and databases
Gerald Rebitzer, Technical University Berlin, Germany "The
main applications are identifying materials for a certain engineering
design,
as well as getting a fast overview of the capabilities of corresponding
manufacturing processes. CES enables the user to find materials
and processes based on engineering design specifications very efficiently.
The old way
of searching through multiple handbooks and databases was very
labor
intensive, but with CES you can see all possible options in a matter
of seconds.
Also, for the 'non-materials' design engineer it is very helpful
to have comparative material and process properties for all material
groups
on
hand."
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