Attending the COFES 2008 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) conference has been a nice surprise. For one thing, the event is being held at the beautiful Scottsdale Plaza Resort near Phoenix, Arizona. Think bright blue skies, hot sunny days, and unusual fauna such as the bottle brush tree, which has what looks like thousand of red, ...

A few other things gleaned from SolidWorks 2008: -- One conference theme was that of teaching kids engineering through robotics. Robotic contests mentioned included ROBOCON, FIRST, and ROBO Cup. Kids can use 3D ContentCentral, a free service on the SolidWorks Web site for locating, configuring, downloading, and requesting 3D parts and assemblies, ...

Day Four, Live from SolidWorks World 2008Don Norman spoke today on how to tie engineering and emotional design. He showed us an images of salt and pepper shakers as an example of bad design. They were burnished stainless steel. One shaker had a hole in the top, and the other shaker had five holes in the top. Norman asked the audience, ''Which ...

Day Three, live from SolidWorks World 2008:Announced today at the opening session of the SolidWorks 2008 show was a new program called 3Dvia Composer -- formerly Seemage -- that Dassault recently purchased. It is a Web-based product that works with SolidWorks to deliver 3D content for non-engineering personnel such as marketing and sales.A few ...