Primer or Prime Express for Students

[mfrench]

One of my students thinks he's found where PTC offers Prime 3.1 to students without expiring in 30 days.  As far as I know, he's talking about Express.  He says it still works, more than 30 days after being downloaded, but I think he's misunderstanding.

Does PTC offer any kind of download for college students other than Express?  I was able to generate some enthusiasm today in class with an impromptu Mathcad demonstration.  They even asked for an additional Mathcad help session outside of class and asked where they could download it, but the interest waned when I told them they would have to pay for it after 30 days.  The same old problem.

[Werner_E · Accepted solution]

Prime and Prime Express are the very same software. It depends on the license file if all feature are available or if features like contour plots, symbolics, solve blocks, programming and a couple of functions which are considered "premium" by PTC are available or not. The crippled version without the aforementioned features is called Prime Express and is, according to PTC, free for lifetime to anyone, not just students. When you download Prime and install it, those premium features are unlocked for a trial period of 30 days and after that time the software falls back in Express mode without the advanced features. Maybe thats the reason your student thought that the software is working after the trial period. In fact it is, but with limited functionality.

With this limited version you still can view sheets which contains premium content and you will see the last results (which are always saved within a sheet), but as soon as you try to recalculate the sheet you will get errors.

So if you need those Premium features you will have to pay for the software. You may look for discounted educational licenses, either single student licenses or a campus license for your university which may enable your students free or very cheap access to Prime and Mathcad.

You may also look for alternatives like SMath studio and see if it meets your requirements.

[mfrench]

Thanks for your help.  This is about what I figured,

I keep hearing about SMath studio, but it seemed to be dormant last time I looked.  Has that changed?

[Werner_E]

I also got the impression that development is somewhat slower than it was at the beginning.

But there still are new releases on a regular basis - still in Version 0.xxx mode.

Last stable update was December 1st,  version 0.98.6179.