Hello all,
I thought I'd post this here to get the community opinions before suggesting it to support.
If I want to learn how to use an aspect of Comsol I work through example models and I visit the forums, and often the advice from the forum is to work through a particular example model. This is, in my opinion, the best way of learning how to use any technical software.
I believe that this process is quite seriously hampered in Comsol compared to other products like Labview/Matlab or even things like Adobe Creative Suite. I think it is hampered because of the structure of the model documentation.
Basically, I think it is near enough useless to give users a step-by-step instruction sheet for how to build an example model without telling them WHY they are doing what they are doing. In almost all cases, when I try to adapt what I have learned from working through the example models to my actual applications, there comes a point where something fails and I have no way of figuring out which aspects of the example models are crucially important and which aspects should be changed because I often don't know what they were doing in the example model or why.
One clear example is in the application of boundary conditions to particular physics (which BCs are necessary for the physics to solve, which are problem-dependant).
Another example of the type of problem is that the built-in material AIR cannot be used with the electric currents interface without changing its conductivity from 0 to some small positive value. I realise the physical reasoning behind this, but this must be such a common problem that I can't believe there isn't some up-front info in the model library examples that explicit state this. It's the kind of problem that can hold new users up for days/weeks and it's not the only one: a user might get past this only to run into another similar problem in the very next step of his/her model.
The way the documentation is written, you might come across a line that says something like "change the value of conductivity from 0 to 1 S/m in the material properties". But there is no explanation of why you are doing this, or whether this is generally important or only important to the specific problem in the example. This means that you could be searching around the documentation for an answer to your problem only to read right over it again and again.
Basically I think the barrier for entry into COMSOL is needlessly high because of the way the documentation is handled. With a relatively tiny amount of work on the part of Comsol (hell, it could even be done by the community) the documentation could be updated and thousands of new users would be able to answer their own questions instead of raising hundreds and hundreds of forum and support tickets. All that is needed is the inclusion of one or two explanatory sentences after each section of the step-by-step instructions.
This is not a rage post, it doesn't relate to a specific problem I am having right now, I genuinely think that Comsol are wasting an opportunity to grow their community and broaden their user-base.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Regards,
Dominic.
I thought I'd post this here to get the community opinions before suggesting it to support.
If I want to learn how to use an aspect of Comsol I work through example models and I visit the forums, and often the advice from the forum is to work through a particular example model. This is, in my opinion, the best way of learning how to use any technical software.
I believe that this process is quite seriously hampered in Comsol compared to other products like Labview/Matlab or even things like Adobe Creative Suite. I think it is hampered because of the structure of the model documentation.
Basically, I think it is near enough useless to give users a step-by-step instruction sheet for how to build an example model without telling them WHY they are doing what they are doing. In almost all cases, when I try to adapt what I have learned from working through the example models to my actual applications, there comes a point where something fails and I have no way of figuring out which aspects of the example models are crucially important and which aspects should be changed because I often don't know what they were doing in the example model or why.
One clear example is in the application of boundary conditions to particular physics (which BCs are necessary for the physics to solve, which are problem-dependant).
Another example of the type of problem is that the built-in material AIR cannot be used with the electric currents interface without changing its conductivity from 0 to some small positive value. I realise the physical reasoning behind this, but this must be such a common problem that I can't believe there isn't some up-front info in the model library examples that explicit state this. It's the kind of problem that can hold new users up for days/weeks and it's not the only one: a user might get past this only to run into another similar problem in the very next step of his/her model.
The way the documentation is written, you might come across a line that says something like "change the value of conductivity from 0 to 1 S/m in the material properties". But there is no explanation of why you are doing this, or whether this is generally important or only important to the specific problem in the example. This means that you could be searching around the documentation for an answer to your problem only to read right over it again and again.
Basically I think the barrier for entry into COMSOL is needlessly high because of the way the documentation is handled. With a relatively tiny amount of work on the part of Comsol (hell, it could even be done by the community) the documentation could be updated and thousands of new users would be able to answer their own questions instead of raising hundreds and hundreds of forum and support tickets. All that is needed is the inclusion of one or two explanatory sentences after each section of the step-by-step instructions.
This is not a rage post, it doesn't relate to a specific problem I am having right now, I genuinely think that Comsol are wasting an opportunity to grow their community and broaden their user-base.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
Regards,
Dominic.