PTC » Mathcad

Teaching and Learning Corner: Mathcad and Constructivism (Part 1)

Chris Hartmann — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:51:08 +0000

One of Mathcad’s key capabilities as a desktop tool is the documentation of intellectual property. Many of our users leverage Mathcad’s mathematical, graphical, and text capabilities to capture the ideas behind their engineering designs. In design and engineering the importance of documenting the knowledge and beliefs behind one’s contributions is well established and critical to progress and success. In education, ...

Mathcad- A Better Choice for Engineering Calculations

John Sheehan — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:38:04 +0000

Excel is an accountant’s tool, a general journal, a ledger. It was never intended to be used by engineers trying to analyze bridge capacity, size transformers, or calculate the stress on a plane’s fuselage. When used for its intended purpose, Excel is an excellent tool, providing tabular displays of numbers, analytics for finance and interactivity through pivot tables and pivot ...

Multi-threading, multi-core and parallel calculation in Mathcad

Jakov Kucan — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:30:34 +0000

One of the features of Mathcad Prime 2.0 is enabling use of multiple processors/cores for worksheet calculations. A natural question is: “How does this help?” As with all finer things in life (and I consider Mathcad in this category), the answer depends on many factors. Before answering the question, let me clarify some of the basic concepts. Multi-threading and parallelism ...

Submit Your Mathcad Ideas and Vote!

Mona Zeftel — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:14:27 +0000

Because we want to hear from you, we’ve added Ideas to the Mathcad Community. You can now share your ideas for new Mathcad features publicly and add your comments to others’ ideas and suggestions for enhancing Mathcad. Posting an Idea Start at the Mathcad Community page. If you or your company has an active maintenance account, you will see an ...

Teaching and Learning Corner: Using Include Worksheets

Chris Hartmann — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:55:00 +0000

As a teenager I was, I realize now, a terrible learner. I attribute this fact to having developed the wrong priorities – I am not sure it was entirely my fault. Success was measured by test scores. High test scores could be attained via rote memorization. Therefore, I focused on memorizing facts in history, formulas in math and science, and ...

Design World Calls Mathcad Prime 2.0 “A Solid Tool for Documenting Engineering Calculations”

Anna Giangregorio — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:37:00 +0000

On April 17th, Evan Yares, Senior Editor and Analyst of Software at Design World reviewed both Mathcad Prime 2.0 and Maple 16 in an article titled, “Math for Engineers: A Look at Mathcad Prime 2.0 and Maple 16.” In this article Yares explored how more and more frequently engineers are running into hidden errors when using spreadsheets and how important ...

Industry Solutions

Juan F. Betts — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:25:21 +0000

In today’s fast-paced world of engineering product development, companies in diverse industry sectors face many business drivers and structural constraints. For instance, in today’s fast paced world of continually accelerated product development cycles and increasing amounts of data, engineering analysis not only needs to be accurate but also timely. Engineers today no longer do product development analysis in “silos” but ...

Temperature Units

Jakov Kucan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:23:53 +0000

Simple units conversion Unit conversion are simple (in most cases): Converting a quantity, say length, from one unit (e.g. inches) to another (e.g. meters) involves multiplying the quantity by a factor (namely 0.0254). This is very convenient because the following calculations can be done without any ambiguity: Why am I even writing about this? This stuff is trivial. A paradox ...

Mathcad Prime 2.0 Nominated for Desktop Engineering’s Editor’s Pick of the Week

Anna Giangregorio — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:00:17 +0000

On Wednesday April 25th, Desktop Engineering presented the Editor’s Pick of the Week Award to Mathcad Prime 2.0. Desktop Engineering explains, “Each week, DE’s Editor at Large, Tony Lockwood, combs through dozens of new product releases and uses his years of engineering industry knowledge to choose a few products and services that he thinks will help engineers innovate by working smarter and ...

ABET Accreditation: Capturing Evidence of Skill Development

neddaniels — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:00:08 +0000

Engineering programs at US colleges and universities keep the ABET accreditation criteria in mind when developing new course content, but the critical piece is the current curriculum. A challenging aspect of the ABET accreditation process is capturing evidence that students are not just passing tests, but developing engineering skill through their course work. What constitutes evidence of assimilation and application ...