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Materials Education News
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2. Web seminar series
A series of short web seminars during the week of January 28th will review the use of the CES EduPack software and teaching resources to support teaching in a number of specialist subject areas. CES EduPack provides information, software, lectures, exercises, and textbooks to support the general teaching of materials engineering, manufacturing, and design. Further specialist information and resources tailor EduPack to suit topics such as aerospace engineering, polymers, architecture, and eco-design. Specialist EduPack components are bundled in targeted CES EduPack Editions. Each web seminar will describe a different Edition and discuss how it is used in teaching at universities and colleges worldwide. The software discussed during these web seminars will be the new CES EduPack 2008.
* 3pm GMT is: 4pm CET, 10am EST, 7am PST. |
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3. Case study audio-visual recording: 'Redesigning' the CD case A new recorded audio-visual presentation is available on the Granta website providing a case study in the use of CES EduPack. It shows how a student exercise (or part of a lecture) could use EduPack to study how materials and process factors combine to influence choice of material for an everyday object - the CD case. It provides a particular insight into the ProcessUniverse - the CES EduPack database of information on shaping, joining, and surface treatment processes - and how this information can be used together with mechanical, economic, and environmental data in a simple materials selection project. This is the second in our growing library of such resources, which aims to share useful experiences and demonstrate how CES EduPack can support teaching. Visit the library of recordings and view the full case study |
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4. Recorded seminar - Teaching first and second year students Granta's library of presentation recordings now also includes Professor Mike Ashby's presentation from the recent web seminar "Teaching Materials to First and Second Year Students". The presentation reviews requirements for first and second year teaching resources and shows how these can be addressed. |
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5. Using CES EduPack with standard texts - Callister, Budinsky, Dieter, Askeland... A notable feature of the seminar on first and second year teaching (above), and of subsequent discussions with attendees, has been the interest in using CES EduPack with a broad range of standard materials texts. CES EduPack has always been closely supported by, and integrated with, Professor Mike Ashby's textbooks, recently enhanced by the introductory Materials: Engineering, Science, Processing and Design. This takes a design-led approach to teaching engineering materials. But CES EduPack is now well-suited to support almost any materials text, whether it takes a design-led or science-led approach. Examples include:
An example of using CES EduPack with one of these texts is described in item 6. |
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6. User example - Case Western Reserve University Mark De Guire at Case Western Reserve University has used CES EduPack to support teaching of a class of second-, third-, and fourth-year students in a 200-level materials science course. This is a "science-led" course that uses Callister's textbook. Students are completing assignments using the CES software. A typical assignment asks them to re-express an exercise from the Callister textbook as a materials selection problem that can be analyzed using the CES EduPack software, and to report the results of their selection, justifying their results. Student feedback has been positive, ranging from "That was fun" to "I wish all of my homework assignments were like that." |
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| 7. Materials data management for university research
Granta supports over 600 universities worldwide through the CES EduPack teaching toolkit. We also apply our materials expertise to help industry with the GRANTA MI materials data management software. But materials data management can also be a vital issue in the academic world. How can research groups ensure that they capture all of their project data, and its full context, for future analysis and re-use? Recent work in the Transportation Research Group at the University of Cambridge answered this question. During a study of road construction materials, the research team applied GRANTA MI to capture data, analyses, and results, concluding "The GRANTA MI material data management system was found to provide all of the necessary data types and data structures needed for managing this test data. Its automated input and output facilities enabled the data importing and analysis tasks to be made fast, reliable and consistent, ensuring efficient generation of high-quality research data." |
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8. Campus-wide licenses go global The broad range of applications for CES EduPack - across engineering subject areas and from first year to post-graduate studies - are encouraging more universities to take flexible campus-wide licenses, which allow all CES EduPack editions to be used in support of any course at the university. An interesting trend is the use of such licenses to support inter-university collaborations, often on a global scale! For example, the University of Warwick 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 Stuart Barnes, Director of Professional Programmes at Warwick 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 EduPack 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 EduPack certainly improved the educational experience for them." A second example is the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University, which now has a campus-wide license to support use of CES EduPack in its first year Engineering Materials course (ENG1050). This has approximately 600 students and is delivered at both their Australian and Malaysian campuses. Contact us for more information on campus-wide and collaborative licenses |
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9. Sharing teaching resources - new sample lectures CES EduPack customers with a current license can use their e-mail address and password to access the supporting teaching resources on the Granta website. These include material and process selection charts, lectures, projects, and student exercises. We've now added a quick link within this section to supplementary materials including Granta publications and our growing library of recorded case studies and presentations. There is also a link to a series of Powerpoint slides covering a course in "Materials Selection in Mechanical Design" from Carlos Caceres at the University of Queensland. Associate Professor Caceres has kindly offered to share this resource with other CES EduPack users. Do you have similar material to share? Contact us. University of Queensland course lectures (download requires CES EduPack user password) |
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10. Upcoming event - EducaTec 2007, Paris, Nov 21-23 Granta is attending this week's EducaTec exhibition in Paris. You will find us on the Cadware booth - we would be delighted to meet you! |
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11. COMING SOON! CES EduPack 2008 The next release of CES EduPack 2008 is already almost here! Look out for the January's Granta Materials News, which will provide full details of new features in areas including Bio Materials, Eco-design, and language support. This new release of CES EduPack will be sent to anyone who holds an annual license for EduPack for next year, or anyone with a perpetual license and a current maintenance agreement. Contact us to check your license status or purchase/renew a license. |
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