When my siblings and I were younger, we had a huge tub
of Legos we’d amassed from birthdays and holidays. We would spread out all the
Legos across my brothers’ room, sifting through them for exactly the pieces we
needed for our creations—the wheels and chassis were always hotly contested,
because even a combination airplane/restaurant/castle could be made infinitely cooler if it could also roll ponderously
across the floor. We also made marble mazes and fortresses out of Jenga blocks
and spent nearly all winter one year fitting together a 3D puzzle of the Notre
Dame cathedral. Once, we made a working Ferris wheel out of K’Nex. Now, 3D
printing is becoming less expensive and less complicated, and students across
the country are getting the opportunity to design and build their own creations
from the ground up.
Bre Pettis, a co-founder and CEO of MakerBot Industries,
imagines
that 3D printing will fundamentally alter how students approach design
challenges. Rather than working around the limitations of a pre-made set of
tools, students will be able to design and print their own items—if the first
try doesn’t work, they can just alter the original design and print again. Additional
reasons for having 3D printing in the classroom are numerous: The printers
could be used to create custom chemical or anatomical models for chemistry and
biology courses; design prototypes for engineering, architecture or graphic
design courses; and even make food molds and cookie cutters for culinary
courses. The range of possibilities keeps expanding as more students and
teachers gain access to the technology and interact through online forums such
as Thingiverse, where users can upload
and download plans for 3D printable items or look through galleries of other
users’ creations.
Museums are also getting in on the fun, like the
American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which has used 3D printing
to create durable copies of fossil specimens for visitors to handle and use in
order to learn about skeleton reconstruction. The Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC, has begun to generate 3D
scans of items in its collection, including some indigenous artifacts,
fossils, and two life masks of Abraham Lincoln, all of which can be downloaded
and 3D-printed anywhere in the world.
In California, Chico High School students have used 3D
printing to build manufacturing
prototypes for local businesses, learning about design and engineering as
well as business principles. The prototypes allow students to confront
real-world problems by applying the concepts they learn in school. The process
benefits the businesses as well, in that their prototypes are much less
expensive and can be made much faster than those their competitors are
creating.
The range of uses for 3D printing in education is
tremendous, and this is only the beginning of the possibilities. These printers
have become easier to build and maintain, less expensive, and more
user-friendly since their inception several decades ago, and schools are taking
advantage of that accessibility to expand the tools teachers and students have
for learning. Imagine learning about DNA by printing strands that can “zip”
together like real DNA does, or drafting plans for a building and then printing
up a small, accurately scaled model to display. I am confident there are uses
for 3D printing that have yet to be thought of; in the meantime, anyone up for
designing an airplane/restaurant/castle with wheels?
Did You Know?
There are a few 3D printing pens available now: they
work like hot glue guns, with a heating element inside the barrel of the pen
and a thin plastic filament that feeds through. The filament is heated just
enough to melt and cools quickly once it’s been drawn, allowing the pen’s user
to create freehand 3D structures directly in the air. Check out the 3Doodler
site for a gallery of
exceptional 3D doodles or the LIX site for a brief video
showing the pen in action.
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