If you’re a professional sports fan, you might think about Saline CAD students as the New York Yankees or Golden State Warriors of STEM. Located in the shadow of the University of Michigan, 10 miles outside of Ann Arbor, the town is home to Saline High School (SHS) and the regional South and West Washtenaw Consortium (SWWC). Year after year, the two schools are absolutely dominant at scholastic CAD and engineering competitions.
For nearly 100 years, the Michigan Industrial Technology Education Society (MITES) has challenged high school students in a regional project-based competition in various technical categories – including machine shop, mechanical drawing, electrical and construction skills. At last year’s MITES competition, Saline students had 111 projects advance to the regionals, with 56 of them later placing first, second or third in the state. The post-competition class photo below tells the story best. Note the plaques from previous classes displayed on the wall:
Running Out of Wall Space – In 2019, South and West Washtenaw Consortium (SWWC) CAD students came home from the prestigious MITES competition with 16 state champions, 22 second place winners and 18 third place finishes. (Photo courtesy of Steve Vasiloff)
Saline students also won state titles in every category they entered in the most recent SkillsUSA competition and represented Michigan at the national championships in Technical Drafting, Architectural Drafting, and Automated Manufacturing Technology. This followed winning a national SkillsUSA title in Automated Manufacturing Technology in 2018.
So what’s their secret to success? Saline teacher Steve Vasiloff, who has 200 students enrolled in his CAD, advanced manufacturing and Project Lead the Way engineering and design classes, says it’s all about cultivating a competitive academic culture. There is a waiting list to get into Vasiloff’s courses, and students have classroom competitions to determine which projects will be entered in statewide contests.
“I was the head coach of a varsity wrestling team for nine years, and a lot of that competitiveness transferred even more so into my CAD program,” he says. “That's how I treat it. I treat it like the real world and tell my students, ‘You are going to be competing to get into college, competing for internships, competing for jobs. You're going to be competing your whole life.’"
“My teaching philosophy has always been, ‘It's your job to do your best. It's my job to make your best better.’ You do your job. I'll do my job. Good things will happen,” Vasiloff adds.
Onshape Helps Teachers Be Prepared for Anything
Using Onshape’s web-based CAD and data management system will allow Michigan technology teacher Steve Vasiloff to remotely offer guidance to his students as if he were face-to-face in the classroom. (Photo courtesy of Steve Vasiloff)
After 15 years teaching with file-based installed CAD systems, Vasiloff has moved all his classes in the fall to cloud-based Onshape. As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, Onshape runs on any computer (Macs, PCs or Chromebooks) or mobile device (iOS or Android), and doesn’t require any installs, downloads, license codes, upgrades or any expensive high-performance hardware.
Like most schools worldwide, Saline had to send their students home last spring for a semester of remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For Vasiloff, the chaos forced him to quickly develop two different lesson plans for each class: one for the “haves” and one for the “have-nots.”
Students who had PCs powerful enough to run installed CAD software were able to continue their radial engine assembly projects at home, while those without CAD access were given impromptu essay questions and discussion topics such as “What was the greatest invention of all time and why?”
“We had been using Autodesk products. So I had to say to everyone, ‘Okay, go home and download Inventor.’ But the kids with Macs and Chromebooks couldn’t do that. Very quickly I had to ask myself, how am I going to be able to do my job and teach CAD remotely? And at the end of last year, I just found it to be impossible.”
The Saline school district is starting the fall with all-remote learning and has a fluid plan to move to a hybrid of in-person classes with some online classes if the coronavirus is kept under control. When Vasiloff’s engineering and manufacturing students use browser-based Onshape, they will have instant access to both their CAD system and their designs – just by logging in with their email address.
To get ready for the upcoming semester, Vasiloff taught himself Onshape this summer using the self-paced training courses in the Onshape Learning Center and used some of those lessons to develop his own curriculum. He says the learning curve is fast for anyone with experience using other CAD systems.
“I was animating constraints in an assembly in under an hour,” he says. “All I had to learn to get started was a few keyboard shortcuts and finding what I needed in some dropdown menus.”
Vasiloff’s easy transition to Onshape is consistent with many high school STEM classes and college engineering and industrial design courses that suddenly switched to cloud CAD in the middle of the semester last spring. But after designing a few 3D models in Onshape, the teacher says he now considers the remote learning benefits to be secondary.
“The built-in version control blew my mind,” he says. “File management is one of the toughest things you can expect a high school kid to handle. I can’t tell you how many times a student will do 20 geometric instructions, put them in a folder, zip it, email it to me and there are 10 files missing. That’s because a student didn’t realize they were saving some of their files in ‘My Documents’ and not in their proper folder.”
“Onshape’s approach is a total game-changer,” Vasiloff adds. “From now on, all their work will be automatically stored in one place.”
“I Could Never Assign My Students Homework Before”
One of the reverse engineering projects in Steve Vasiloff’s classes is to take apart a toy car and recreate it as a 3D CAD model. (Photos courtesy of Steve Vasiloff)
Vasiloff has traditionally held after-school and lunchtime help sessions in the school’s computer lab because many students have been unable to access their CAD work at home.
“Now, I can actually increase the rigor of my classes, knowing that these kids will all have access at home,” he says. “One of the coolest parts of my job is that the technology is always changing. My sister is an English teacher and I’ve joked with her about how ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is always going to be ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ An important book, but the story isn’t going to change. Every year, I’m re-evaluating my tools. I’m always trying to figure out what we can do better.”
Onshape Education Enterprise: Reducing the IT Burden for Schools and Universities
Thousands of K-12 schools and universities have relied on the zero-cost Onshape Education Standard plan since its launch in 2016. PTC released Onshape Education Enterprise, a new premium edition for educational institutions to more easily manage teacher and student usage across classes, departments and school organizations.
The Education Enterprise plan allows institutions to significantly reduce their administrative overhead by easily scaling up CAD access, managing permissions and gaining insights into student design activity through real-time analytics. (A comprehensive rundown of the benefits of this new premium plan can be found here.)
In response to the challenges and uncertainties of the upcoming academic year, PTC is offering the Onshape Education Enterprise plan free for one year to schools and universities that sign up by November 20, 2020. To learn more about this offer and how it can help your unique educational needs, please connect with the Onshape Education team here.
