Having spent nearly forty years in design education I recognise the problem of developing students ability to communicate their ideas. Capability with freehand sketching and 3D modelling are fundamental to this and, like learning a foreign language or musical instrument, practice is the key.
The most successful approach in schools has students installing PTC Creo on their home computers (included in the free school license) as soon as they start at the school and take them through the basics of the software. The PTC Creo Primer was written for this purpose.
The next step is to use PTC Creo to model or reverse engineer familiar objects made up of simple geometric shapes to build confidence. This can be done as homework assignments so that classroom time is available for design challenges. If students have problems or need to know a new technique, have them register for Precision LMS (FREE for k-12) which contains over 2000 hours of online multi-media tutorials for PTC Creo. A response to your previous request for help in these forums suggested Precision LMS is all you need. This might work if your primary focus was learning PTC Creo but design capability is a much higher level use of Creo.
Using the approach outlined above, classroom time can be devoted to a series of design challenges where PTC Creo is used to develop student's own solutions to the brief. We provide materials for a number of curriculum projects including; Scalextric4Schools, F1 in Schools (CO2 racers), FIRST Robotics and Real World Design Challenge. All of these are available free on www.ptcschools.com
