The difficulties of installing university-licenced software : ‘Next, next, accept, run’

Giving free access (student licenses) to particular software packages is one of the greatest support one in their years of education can get from the university or software providers. However, it is worth taking a look at the circumstances of the installation process.Students at Budapest University of Technology and Economics experienced some serious difficulties while installing MatLab, a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment, which is continuously used during the B.Sc. and M.Sc. studies. We examined mechatronics engineer freshmen (Department for Mechanical Engineering) of the university installing student licensed MatLab on their own laptops performing (second level) TAP. An open source software, Inkscape was used during the experiment as a reference.Our main aspects were how time- consuming and how mentally stressful it is for students to acquire the software.To get exact and numeric values of the latter, NASA Task Load Index papers were used after each software got installed.