PTC University Academic Program is giving students and educators all PTC software free of cost with a limited period license. Students can use this free software to prepare for class, complete homework assignments, and to become familiar with a product that over 27,000 companies use. Included is a one year timed license of PTC Creo Student Edition. The intent of this license is to expand PTC’s opportunity to provide PTC Creo to all students. PTC offers a free seat of PTC Creo Student Edition to any student that is part of the PTC Academic Program. Other subjects covered in the 101-page PTC Creo Primer Guide for Students include the PTC Creo Parametric interface Working directories and saving work Working Directly Theory opening files saving files starting and extrude creating a sketch and much more. The guide then explains how to put those two items together to form an assembly and create a photo-realistic rendered image and engineering drawing. Students will be taught how to use PTC Creo Parametric to model two components for a construction kit, a cube and a strut. The primer teaches students how to use PTC Creo Parametric by providing an example of how they might use the software in the real world. Of course the integrated module is valuable in a commercial environment where it saves time and retains consistency in updating CNC outputs when the design changes that's the distinguishing factor that is lost when using an export.The primer introduces the modeling, visualization and design tools in PTC Creo Parametric, the company’s flagship 3D CAD software. I would expect most schools have several CAD programs in their training and would want to support just one CNC process rather than multiple different CAD programs with unique needs and interfaces. I think the student version can export formats that other CNC software can use, so there are alternatives in order to make parts if the school doesn't have the PTC machining module. When a University has NC equipment available to students they will also have set up workstations with the NC programming modules and the post processors and models of all the tools that are available to use in the NC equipment. To drive the equipment requires post processing software to convert the tool paths into particular instructions and tool descriptions so the paths can be generated and so that reasonable paths can be programmed to begin with.

To clarify for other searches on this topic - there is no point for a student license to have access to the NC module because students typically don't have direct access to NC equipment.

Creo student edition