[senna95]

Which would be the best thing for my 14 year old son to begin learning?
I use Solidworks at my job but the school is part of PLTW which uses Autocad Inventor. I dont want him to get used to Solidworks and then have have a hard time in school with Autocad. Any thoughts?

[Rockn-Roll]

When I was taking my drafting courses in 1989 at Cal State Univ - Sacramento the department had just received 30 workstations from Intel with Autocad installed...we didn't use them that first semester because the instructors wanted to get some experience on them and develop an appropriate courseplan. Instead, we continued to learn on the existing CadKey workstations...I dug in deep into CadKey and by the end of the semester I had developed macros to make my life easier for example I could rotate an entire part or just sections by any angle I gave it; thus, I could draw the part in one view and select all then give it a 90º rotation to create the other views...everyone else had to rotate the parts one line at a time.

The next semester in advanced drafting we were put onto the autocad stations. Did I lose anything by learning CadKey? Yes...I lost the macros that I developed. Did that cause me any problems? No...in fact it helped me to dig in with the knowledge that somehow I would be able to accomplish the same thing in autocad. I was able to learn not only how to design in both CadKey and autocad, but discovered the differences. In the macro example CadKey depended on the OS for a lot of it's features passing parameters to/from Unix batch files while in autocad the features were built-in to the application.

My advice is to ask your son if he wants to make the additional effort to learn both applications...it is extra work, but can be rewarding. If he focuses only on autocad then he most likely will learn more of the autocad features, but nothing about why SolidWorks would be more desireable for some situations while autocad is better in others. It would also look good on his resume to indicate working knowledge of both applications.

[senna95]

Great answer. Thats the way I looked at it also. I haven't used Inventor at all so I would be learning at the same time. Good bonding time.