Free education license

Blockpad is completely free to use for educational use, with the full suite of Blockpad features for both students and educators.

Setting up the educational license

The first step is to create a free personal account with Blockpad, if you haven't already.

From there, you can get a free educational license from the link below. This license expires after 1 year, but you can renew it as long as you still qualify.

Once you have the license, you can use the full web app, windows app, or mac app. For the windows and mac app, just download the software and connect your account to the app.

Why should students use Blockpad?

Students around the world use Blockpad for their schoolwork, including homework, reports, and theses.

There are many advantages to using Blockpad:

• Blockpad is simple to start, especially if you're familiar with Excel.
• Calculations in Blockpad are easy to read, for both you and your professor.
• Since they are easier to read, it helps you (or your professor) catch mistakes.
• When you catch a mistake, it's easy to update.
• Units in the calculations means less number crunching, and even more help catching errors.
• You can save Blockpad to a pdf, and everything is still clearly visible.
• The word processing means you can write reports with live calculations inside.
• Blockpad has formatting tools to get your paper looking presentable (or to meet your instructors style requirements).
• There are a range of calculation tools, from matrix operations and scripting to equation solvers.
• It's free for you to use!

To compare to some alternatives:

• Excel has limited math features and forces calculations into accounting spreadsheets.
• Mathcad is cumbersome and not practical for most tasks.
• Matlab, Python, and other coding tools require more software skills and do not build in documents, spreadsheets, and enginering notebooks.

Blockpad skills are valuable in industry — Blockpad is used more and more in engineering firms, and, even at firms that don't use Blockpad yet, the skills are applicable since it works similar to Word and Excel.

Why should educators use Blockpad?

For all of the reasons listed above, many professors encourage their students to use Blockpad for their assignments. The students are better able to focus on the core of the engineering content, and professors get a more polished, reviewable assignment turned in.

In addition to that, we know of a few instructors that like to use Blockpad to create the educational content they share with the class, whether it's examples or just writing the assignments.

You might also find Blockpad useful in your research work or just as your new side calculator. It's a versatile tool used in many disciplines and industries.

Interested in using Blockpad in the classroom? We'd love to hear from you - please feel free to contact us.

Why do we make Blockpad free for education use?

We are committed to providing the best calculation tools to the industry, and we don't believe in overly burdensome licensing rules. Of course, we hope you will spread the word if you find Blockpad useful!

How can an education instution use Blockpad on its computers?

We encourage making Blockpad available on campus computer labs. Students can connect their free education licenses to the desktop application once installed.

Who is the Blockpad team?

Blockpad is founded by structural and mechanical engineers who want to provide the best calculation tools for the industry.

For students interested in engineering and software

The intersection of software development and physical engineering disciplines is the most exciting place to be in the engineering space. If you are interested in this space, whether directly in projects like Blockpad or in calculation libraries, simulation models, or AI tools that could be built on our platform, we would love to meet you.