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18-Opal
January 3, 2022

PTC Mathcad Community Challenge Index and Guidelines

  • January 3, 2022
  • 43 replies
  • 516807 views

PTC is pleased to announce the Mathcad Community Challenge, a bimonthly event where we’ll post an open-ended challenge for you to solve using PTC Mathcad Prime. Feel free to collaborate with other users and their worksheets by attaching your worksheet to your posts here. Participants will also earn PTC Community Badges!

In general, at the start of every other month, we’ll post a new thread with the challenge. You can post in that thread throughout the month with contributions. Around the middle of the next month, PTC and our affiliates will go through the contributions and create a resolution to it in the form of a Mathcad.com blog article discussing your interesting approaches to the problem. Then, we’ll post a new challenge at the start of the next month.

We hope you enjoy this challenge!

Some rules and guidelines:

  • Your contributions will be monitored by PTC and PTC-affiliated parties. We may use them in marketing material, including in post-challenge discussions hosted on PTC properties like Mathcad.com and PTC.com
  • Use PTC Mathcad’s documentation features in your contributions so everyone can follow along
  • Use units whenever possible
  • Only .mcdx (Mathcad Prime) worksheets will be eligible for participation. Mathcad Express Prime files are allowed
  • It is greatly preferred to not use external custom function .dlls. While it's cool to show off Mathcad Prime's custom function feature, relying on them to solve challenges defeats the purpose that these are meant to be solved using Mathcad
  • Humans should create your solution, not an artificially intelligent (AI) bot. Show off your skills as an engineer or mathematician!

Look out for posts by Dave Martin, a former Mathcad instructor, author of Mathcad books, contributor to our Mathcad.com and PTC.com blogs, and occasional contributor to the Mathcad and Creo YouTube channels. He also runs the popular “Creo Parametric” YouTube channel. Learn more about Dave here.

Challenges List/Archive:

 

 

Note: Content will be moderated in accordance with challenge guidelines. Please focus your replies accordingly.

 

 

43 replies

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
March 3, 2025

How do magnets work?

 

 

Maybe you can tell me part of that answer by the time you've completed the March 2025 challenge on magnetism...!

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
April 22, 2025

Replying to DJNewman

Alright I know how magnets work now, especially with the solution blog for the March challenge being live on mathcad.com

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
May 1, 2025

The May 2025 challenge is up. It's about spin gravity and requires... some creativity! Are you up for that challenge?

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
July 2, 2025

The July 2025 challenge is up, and the May 2025 challenge's blog will be coming... soon? Whenever other teams at PTC get it published.

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
July 10, 2025

Replying to DJNewman

(it's published now; it's a good read too)

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
September 2, 2025

September 2025's challenge is up! It's based on programming.

 

Werner already has a strong-looking first entry. Can anyone approach it differently or iterate on his work?

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
October 17, 2025

Given recent entries, we added new guidelines around the use of external custom function .dlls (discouraged) and generative artificial intelligence (these should not be doing your work for you).

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
October 29, 2025

We're putting a close on the September 2025 challenge, and its solution blog is live on... ptc.com.

 

The next challenge will begin very shortly.

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
October 31, 2025

November 2025 challenge is up. Try to simulate Battleship, the game, in Mathcad, as much as you want / can.

DJNewman18-OpalAuthor
18-Opal
November 19, 2025

Replying to DJNewman

The November 2025 challenge's deadline is December 13, 2025. A bit extra time!