The DriveWorks Challenge Recap

The DriveWorks Challenge is a popular part of our DriveWorks Drivers meetings and also featured at this year’s DriveWorks World.

Heather Hasz, DriveWorks Brand & Community Ambassador, and Paul Gimbel, DriveWorks Sherpa, hosted DriveWorks Challenge #5 live. They recapped the challenge brief and shared some of the submissions that we’d already had in. It was a great way to share more information about the challenge and to show everyone how easy it is to get involved.

Heather and Paul rejoined on Day 2 to give an update on challenge #5 submissions and find out who the overall challenge winners were.

In this blog, we recap the previous challenges in more detail. And even though prizes have been awarded, you can still take part. All of the challenges that we’ve run so far are still available to take part in via the DriveWorks Learning Portal.

What Is The DriveWorks Challenge?

The idea of the DriveWorks Challenge is simple, we provide you with a brief and a starter project, and all you need to do is complete the project to meet the requirements in the brief. The challenge is designed to be relatively quick (we certainly don’t want to make more work for you!) and to help you explore new ways of thinking and working within DriveWorks.We will give you plenty of time to complete the challenge and you can put as much or as little effort into it as you see appropriate. The DriveWorks Challenge is open to, and achievable by all DriveWorks skill levels. You don’t need to have any engineering, IT or SOLIDWORKS knowledge.At the end of the challenge, we post a video and DriveWorks Package (.drivepkg) in the DriveWorks Learning Portal showing how we solved the challenge, along with some of our favorite submissions.

DriveWorks Challenge #1

The topic of the DriveWorks Challenge #1 was Form Data Validation – to creatively guide the users of the (fictitious) Imaginative Industries Interstellar Hydraulic Cylinder Configurator to design valid products.

We asked for your help to modify one of our configurators to make sure that the cylinders that the users are specifying could actually be manufactured.

DriveWorks Challenge #2

For DriveWorks Challenge #2, we asked you to create the most “user hostile” form you can – we wanted to see your most creative, hardest to use solutions!

Recognizing how hard it can be to always follow the best practice, this project is all about breaking the rules. We encouraged you to think about what not to do as this can be really valuable in recognizing how to improve the user interface of your DriveWorks implementation.

DriveWorks Challenge #3

DriveWorks Challenge #3 is a bit different than the first two. Instead of focusing on the front end, it’s very computational and focuses on the back end.

For this DriveWorks Challenge, we asked you to create a new component that helps our fictional piping system design company, Premier Piping, to optimize the cutting of their pipes. We wanted DriveWorks to take a list of pipe segments and output the optimal way to cut them from raw 250m stock pipes, with the aim of minimizing the amount of wasted pipe.

DriveWorks Challenge #4

DriveWorks Challenge #4 is all about how creatively you can use SVG images. We created a DriveWorks project that allowed you to generate SVG elements live in a DriveWorks form. We wanted to see the best use of that or the technique that we’ve developed (and yes, we only used native DriveWorks functionality, of course). So, you could use the project to create a cool graphic, or create some kind of 2D preview for your product, or some clever user experience.

DriveWorks Challenge #5

For DriveWorks Challenge #5 we asked you to develop a new and creative (or familiar) way to select multiple items. Using the DriveWorks Challenge #5 salad configurator your challenge was to show us how you would give the user the ability to select multiple salad toppings.

Learn More About The DriveWorks Challenge

New DriveWorks challenges are announced at our quarterly DriveWorks Drivers meetings and all of the past challenges, including video briefs​, starter projects, solutions and explanations of how/why the solutions work​ are available in the DriveWorks Learning Portal for you to go back and explore.

Even though the previous challenge prizes have been awarded, you can continue to get involved. You can still take part in the challenge, submit your answers, and we will be happy to review them and send you feedback.

DriveWorks Learning Portal

DriveWorks Challenge #6 Launch At The June DriveWorks Drivers Meeting

DriveWorks Challenge #6 will be launched at our next DriveWorks Drivers meeting on 6th June.

This meeting will be virtual so you can join from anywhere, and will last around 60 minutes. It will run at two different times to suit most time zones – 3pm (BST) and 1.30pm (NZST).

Follow the links below to register through the MyDriveWorks Community – you will need a MyDriveWorks account. Don’t worry if you don’t have an account yet, it’s quick and easy to create one.