PTC Education has worked extensively with the University of Toronto’s Ready Lab, headed by Dr. Alison Olechowski.
Ready Lab’s main focus is studying how engineering teams effectively cooperate and the numerous questions that arise in this area. Since 2011, they’ve published over 70 highly regarded papers and collaborated with other influential research institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University. For their CAD research needs, they mainly utilize Onshape for its “unintrusive data collection and efficient data access, scalable for large-scale experiments and studies.”
Championing Equity in CAD Curriculum with Onshape
Liz DaMaren is a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Dr. Olechowski at Ready Lab and a major contributor to research mentioned later in this article. Her work centers around student learning engagement and equity considerations in computer-aided design (CAD) software education. Not only is her resume impressive – she’s worked in the technology industry for companies like Tesla and has been awarded many prestigious prizes – she’s also a recent Certified Onshape Associate.
Since joining Ready Lab in 2021, DaMaren has worked closely with PTC Education and Onshape. Of the numerous CAD software systems she could use for her research, she chose Onshape because of its easy access to background data analytics.
“Onshape was not the first CAD software that I learned, but certainly, from a research perspective, the benefits and access to data stand out amongst the field,” DaMaren said.
DaMaren and Ready Lab also prefer Onshape due to its intuitive, easy-to-pick-up design and its use within remote learning environments, where DaMaren conducts some of her research.
“One of the really powerful things about Onshape is that it enables more collaboration in classrooms,” she said. “I had some work with other CAD software previously, but coming into Onshape, I realized the ease of setting it up with no headaches of a 2-hour install.”
DaMaren’s goal for her research contributions to the Ready Lab is that they result in CAD curriculum changes and interventions designed using this information, which will not only help encourage broader and better participation in students but also within the wider engineering industry.
“For a long time, it’s been how you learn the software, how you use the tool, how you click the buttons,” DaMaren said. “But I think the industry is demanding more from the designers, more creative designs, more collaboration, and more efficiency. And so by integrating learning theory, we can help improve and standardize CAD education in a way that increases accessibility and efficiency for students.”
According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, in 2021, academic researchers at institutions nationwide performed a whopping 44% of the United States’ basic research. From 2013 to 2022, the AAU’s (Association of American Universities) 71 leading research universities generated 127 million citations and 5.5 million publications.
Higher education institutions are integral to research efforts in the United States and the world.
The Ready Lab Team in 2024. (Courtesy: readylab.mie.utoronto.ca/) PTC’s Commitment to Research
At PTC Education, one of our driving missions is to empower all educators and students alike to access PTC’s premier cloud-native CAD and PDM system, Onshape. Onshape’s rapid expansion and adoption are not limited only to the commercial realm; students and educators internationally are leveraging Onshape over other traditional and restrictive CAD systems in the classroom.
Faculty often require comprehensive and sophisticated tools to keep up with cutting-edge research's complexity and demands. Onshape has immense collaborative potential enabled by its revolutionary cloud-native technology. Whether you want to collaborate with colleagues or fellow researchers in real-time or asynchronously, in person, hybrid, or remotely, and on any device that has access to the internet, Onshape, the versatile tool that it is, makes it easy and fun to achieve your academic goals.
Onshape is also designed to be easily accessed and adopted by professionals and educators alike, with its user-friendly UI and the vast learning material in our Learning Center.
Beyond this, it might be surprising to learn that faculty also leverage Onshape in their studies. Onshape is a powerful tool for facilitating research and a fantastic medium for conducting experiments with the comprehensive research analytics that Onshape can provide.
Onshape as a Vehicle for Collaborative CAD Research
Look no further than our very own manager of Education Innovation, Dr. Matthew Mueller. A former Tufts University graduate and lecturer, he has been heavily involved in numerous research collaborations, conferences, and publications with renowned institutions worldwide. Some notable schools that Mueller has collaborated with and continues to collaborate with include global research universities like Pennsylvania State University, the University of Toronto, and, of course, his alma mater, Tufts.
Just last year, Mueller, DaMaren, and colleagues at the Ready Lab, with researchers at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, published All’s Not Fair in CAD: An Investigation of Equity of Contributions to Collaborative Cloud-based Design Projects. This research paper sought to analyze anonymized user data gathered about clicks and user behavior (called an “audit trail”) exported from Onshape Enterpris ke Analytics and measure collaboration using the established framework dubbed the “Multi-User CAD - Collaborative Learning Framework (MUCAD-CLF)” within a cloud-native CAD environment.
An overview of the MUCAD-CLF. (Source: The multi-user computer-aided design collaborative learning framework - ScienceDirect) This paper is as much a study about CAD as it is about the nuanced dynamics of human collaboration. Mueller and his colleagues studied a group of nine students enrolled in a Mechanical Engineering teaching program at the Technion Faculty of Education in Science and Technology. These nine students were tasked as a team to design a walking mechanism for a robot using Jansen’s linkage leg mechanism as a reference. Students analyzed the leg mechanism, developed it using Onshape, and were eventually tasked to 3D print their solution.
After analyzing the data that was pulled from Onshape, the researchers identified a trend in collaborative CAD, namely that within these settings, there tends to be a “dominant” team member that does a majority of the CAD work and makes the important decisions in a CAD document (i.e., deletions in models, mating in assemblies, etc.). This team member would effectively become the document’s “Owner” even if everyone is supposed to be equal contributors. Due to this inequity and its many implications for teams in the academic and professional world, the researchers recommended a few steps to remediate this situation.
Source: All’s Not Fair in CAD: An Investigation of Equity of Contributions to Collaborative Cloud-based Design Projects Steps for an Equitable Engineering Workplace
A solution the researchers offered to remediate inequity within this space was incorporating analytics into CAD platforms, which provides “easy access to team contribution statistics on shared CAD files.” (Which Onshape already has!)
Companies and academic institutions using these analytics could alleviate the problem of over/under contribution in-house by notifying collaborators whether they are under/over contributing above or below a certain determined threshold. This would ensure equal contribution among team members and equal “ownership” of the project.
The results and recommendations found using this study are more important than ever in today’s modern day and age. With 4.83 million people working in the mechanical engineering adjacent field, 44,794 degrees awarded in mechanical engineering, and the average annual salary for someone in this field being $131,370 as of fiscal year 2022, studying how teams collaborate within a CAD environment in an educational and workforce setting and remediations to issues is not only interesting from an academic’s standpoint but extremely valuable to every single company out there that relies on CAD technology as well.
We at PTC Education are committed to bringing Onshape (for free!) to educational institutions, educators, and students worldwide so cutting-edge research like those described above can continue on all different facets empowered by our technology. We take no greater joy than seeing the multitude of groundbreaking feats that educators and students can accomplish every single day using Onshape. If the past indicates the future, then we genuinely look forward to hearing more about what Onshapers can achieve in the years to come!
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