High School Students Complete the DriveWorksXpress Certification!

Ethan is a 17-year-old Junior at the Ayer Shirley Regional High School in Ayer, Massachusetts. He has been a member of the cross country team for 5 years and also worked on the school’s literary magazine.

Ethan has been a part of the FIRST Robotics team since 8th grade. He has worked on the software team and now works on the CAD team.

“By using SOLIDWORKS, we are able to model the robot before pieces are built by the hardware team. This gives us a better perspective of the path we are going to take. FIRST Robotics, and engineering as a whole, has put me on a course leading toward majoring in an engineering field when I get to college, and most likely going into the respective career path.”

“The DriveWorksXpress Training was an easy and effective way to learn the program. The program allowed us to go step by step through the process in an easy to follow environment. The Certification itself covered everything. The ease of the program allowed us to finish both training and certification within 2 hours.”

Alana is also a 17-year old Junior at the Ayer Shirley Regional High School.

She plays on the high school soccer team and also plays flute in the concert band. She is a member of the National Honors Society.

She has been on the FIRST robotics team since its original year in 2014 (when she was in 7th grade). She has been a part of the CAD team every year which is how she first learned about SOLIDWORKS.

Being on the robotics team has inspired and encouraged Alana to go into the engineering field and now she has an extra certification to take with her.

“The DriveWorksXpress Training was easy to follow and very helpful. I liked that the Certification process was easy to understand. Anyone that takes the time to learn the software has a quick and easy way to become certified.”

FIRST Robotics team FRC 4905, Andromeda One, at Ayer Shirley Regional High School is a five-year team that has been a growing success.

Each year they have expanded their capabilities as the team learns what it means to design and build a competition robot in 6 ½ weeks.

Earl has been the CAD mentor for the team for the last four years. Over that time, he has been teaching students how to use SOLIDWORKS to design parts and assemblies needed to build the robot that the team use in competitions.

This season he has encouraged the senior members of the team to become Certified SOLIDWORKS Associates (CSWA) and Certified DriveWorksXpress Associates (CDWXA).

“Over the past four years, the CAD team has been expanding their use of SOLIDWORKS from making sensor mounts in the first year to this year having all components of the robot developed in CAD before they end up on the robot. I felt that it was time for the two senior CAD students, Alana and Ethan, to prove their skills by taking the CSWA certification in their Junior year of High School.”

“As we have come to understand the team’s goals of approaching the robot design, we are now turning to DriveWorksXpress to help with the initial design of the robot in the hectic first week of the build season when we need to build the initial drivetrain of the robot. DriveWorksXpress will help us out in this goal.”

“As a result, Alana, Ethan and I went through the DriveWorksXpress tutorials and took the certification exam that followed the tutorial. All the while considering different parts of the robot that we could leverage the capabilities of DriveWorksXpress when defining our robot.”

A huge well done to Ethan, Alana and Earl for becoming Certified DriveWorksXpress Associates.

Ethan and Alana have made a great start on their careers in engineering.