Autodesk dropping support for Competitions?

So it seems that with New Educational Account validation processes, Autodesk is no longer supporting users who are NOT associated with a high school or a post secondary educational organization. This effectively means that if you are home schooled or middle school, or part of a group that is not a school, or even if you are a mentor on any team (but not an employee of the school), then you can’t get Fusion or Inventor or any other Autodesk product for free.

I think this is a big change from the past.
I think this is rather sad since we’ve all had great support from Autodesk in the past, particularly since Autodesk continues to advertise support for these competitions.

–marcel

It’s a good opportunity to look at SolidWorks or onshspe. Sponsorship is tied to teams, not necessarily schools. More details here: CAD for VEX Robotics.pdf (299.7 KB)

I like Autodesk Fusion for it’s cloud based colaborative capabilities and it’s direct support for CAM and 3D printing…

I guess my consternation is that I don’t think it’s right for Autodesk to advertise and claim they fully support these Competitions when they don’t…

Even though I am a valid high school student, and have a 100% valid license, I can tell you that Autodesk never did anything to confirm that fact. Use this information as you please.

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Fusion 360 is free for personal/hobbyist use; sounds to me like VRC teams not affiliated with a school would meet the requirements outlined in that page.

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Well…
This morning, they’ve adjusted things a bit to at least allow for registration of new accounts to be tied to a “Design Competition Mentor”… This is a great Fix, Thank you Autodesk for listening.

I’m not sure if they’ve told their support staff yet :-)… They still claim you need to be a teacher at a high school or a university… :slight_smile:

Last note… Autodesk still haven’t updated anything with regard to Students, so you need to be a minimum High School aged student to get the free software… Middle Schoolers are not eligible for Educational accounts.

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