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Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

Khan Academy- I’m a fan

November 30, 2012

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A few months ago, I heard a news program on NPR about the Khan Academyand how it was started accidentally by Mr. Khan to help his niece with her math homework. Since he lived far away from her, he captured his helpful hints via YouTube and shared via the Internet. One thing led to another and now Khan has found himself the creator of something big.

Since that NPR special, I’ve had a few chances to visit the website. There are over 3,200 videos on a wealth of subjects. I found myself touring around and clicking on things like art history, science, economics, history and even SAT prep, and getting progressively more excited by the proposition that this is a tipping point to excite kids to continue to be curious about math and science as they get older.

The Khan Academy concept reminded me of Professor Fornetti’s ExploreRFYouTube Channel, which offers training courses and webinars in RF and microwave related subjects, and of course AWR’s own AWR.TVportal. Our numerous video tutorials and vignettes are meant to accomplish the same for RF/Microwave education as Khan is for mathematics. Both aim to excite current and future users to learn more about the wealth of capabilities in AWR’s software as well as the fundamental mathematic theories it solves.

AWR continues to be committed to helping university students learn more about RF/microwave design. To that end, we recently ran a contest to see if our strategies of supporting university engineering courses, awarding free software to engineering graduates, and sponsoring the IMS and EuMW Student Design Contests were having a positive impact. We were excited to find many success stories, two of which we have recently published. One design student at Istanbul University of Technology (read the story here>>) actually taught himself how to use Microwave Office through our documentation, extensive library of examples, and, most importantly, our AWR.TV videos. His journey resulted in a low noise amplifier design that won the Turkey Graduation Design Competition and was a finalist at the IMS Student Design Competition. Another student from Vienna University of Technology (read the story here>>) was able to design an X-band transmission analyzer from end to end thanks to several master’s degree courses that offered the use of Microwave Office, as well as attentive technical support. His design won the IMS Student Design Competition. Details on both of these stories can be found in the success stories included in this newsletter.

Khan Academy and Professor Fornetti; yep, I’m a fan of these new concepts for helping a breadth of students learn remotely through innovative means such as online videos. I hope they each expand and grow in “frequency” of content and exposure. Knowledge is always something we can use more of. And I certainly intend to follow this model for AWR and hopefully help many more aspiring engineering students to become great designers in the future.