APPLICATION OF CAD TOOLS IN GENERAL TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION

Teaching of technical culture should enable students to acquire basic technical competencies, including drawing, design and graphic communication. Expected students' achievements refer to the types of drawings, drawing metrics, orthogonal projections, sketch design, spatial and schematic views, etc. Adopting competencies for drawing and design assumes the time required for training, which can limit the creative expression of students. However, in engineering and other areas, computer-aided design (CAD) has pushed traditional design, and the question arises as to whether the CAD tool can shorten the time needed to develop these competences and stimulate the students' creativity. The paper analyses customized CAD solutions based on which the conditions of application in the teaching of technical culture are introduced. Analysing around thirty CAD tools, their numerous advantages have been identified, such as quick designing, simple changes to the drawing and ease of display view. Due to the limited time, the learner in the selected CAD needs to quickly and easily accept the basic methods and commands, which implies high adaptability of the tools for the students’ age. At the same time, CAD tools should be highly accessible to schools as well as enable learning from home. To appreciate the principle of visualization and help all students in visualization of designed objects, 3D tools are far more appropriate and more suitable than 2D tools. Requirements according to the computer system should also be acceptable for schools, and it is desirable to use tools applicable to materials such as paper, wood or metal, examples of which are presented in the paper. The analysis of the CAD tools has set out a few, which largely meet the requirements of teaching technical culture. Requirements include high student age adaptation, high availability, 3D visualization and application for different types of materials and technologies. The compliance of CAD tools with all these requirements is only a basic prerequisite for successful application in general technology education.