3D Printing - A Shared Adventure

Sometimes you start an adventure only to realize that every time you talk about your learning, you are inspired by those around you.  Our school has been extremely fortunate to have acquired a 3D printer for $100 as well as to have created a community partnership with Radiant Fabrication.  Yesterday while presenting at DENapalooza Milwaukee, I realized how fortunate I have been to access this new technology not only to use it with our students but also to share our learning adventure with other educators.

At this time the 3D printer has been used to teach our kindergarten students about new technologies while also looking at how 2D shapes compose 3D shapes.  While watching the 3D printer print a selected design for their teacher from Thingiverse, our students assembled 3D printed interlocking triangles to create tetrahedrons and then were given their own interlocking cube or tetrahedron.  I sized the stl file on the MakerBot so that I could print many small interlocking shapes so that each student had one.  I found that they became pretty fragile when sized too small, which is what I did.  

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Recently we have started to explore the idea of student designed charms using Charmr.  Students in our after-school program really enjoyed this tool as well as colleagues at DENapalooza Milwaukee.  The advantages to this type of printing is that it is excellent for entry level creation and prints in a short amount of time.  We have created school charms for our rainbow loom because you can copy and paste multiple charms to the build plate and let the printer go.

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