Several organizations, from universities and independent workshops to maker/hackerspaces have used Upverter for teaching PCB design to aspiring hardware engineers.
They’ve emailed us with the reasons Upverter worked well + some tips they learned for making the teaching experience a success. Here they are:
Why Upverter is great for teaching
- Realtime collaboration makes it easy for the teacher to demonstrate concepts on a single central design that all the students can watch in real-time and then fork afterwards.
- Upverter works on any OS/browser so students can bring the laptop of their choice. There is nothing to download and install, making it easy to get started.
- The central parts library makes it easy to share components among students
- The instructor can easily markup a student’s design and give advice
- Since Upverter runs in the browser, students can continue to work from home when the workshop is finished and share their work with other students.
Tips For Running a Successful Workshop
- Create a team ahead of time so that all student projects are grouped in one place.
- Create base designs under the team that students can fork and use as a starting point. The same goes for components and libraries. If you’re running regular workshops you’ll only need to do this once.
- Create a fun place for students to embed their design (ie. on your website or blog).
- Be sure to include manufacturing in your lesson. Have students submit their PCB to a manufacturer so they get something tangible in their hands – it’s a great feeling!
Do you have any other tips?