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I recently got a job at the local high school teaching a class on 3D printing and had some thoughts that Id like to share about perspective with everyone.

The teacher I took over for was a business major, the way she was teaching the class was having the kids design fidget spinners and other knick knacks and selling them in the school cafeteria in order to finance more equipment for the class.
The teacher before her majored in art history, he was using the 3d printer to make cultures and other pieces of art with the kids.
I am still in school, but my major is mechanical engineering. I have been steering the class towards making assemblies and designing parts.

I was just contemplating how that slight change in perspective completely changed a class. Its the same kids, the same equipment, the same room. But the class itself is completely different based on the way the instructor is looking at it.

Well, as an ME, you're teaching additive manufacturing, not 3D printing. Much more marketable that way.

This will totally sound sexist, but push the girls to take an interest! I'm in school now to finish my ME (at 38 years old) and women are STILL out numbered 15 to 1 in my field of study classes. The humanities building is about 4 to 1 the other way.

REDONE wrote:Well, as an ME, you're teaching additive manufacturing, not 3D printing. Much more marketable that way.

That's perspective too Matt, I say it's better to hook em on 3D printing and then introduce them to the more advanced side of the coin. These are kids were talking about here.

Something I will say after spending two years in a STEM class where we did a lot of 3D printing is this. Don't underestimate the value of getting to print a personal project. Every student in our class got time to print their own project that they modeled and printed. We were given a print material budget by the district, it ended up being about 13 hours of print time. That doesn't end up being a very large print but we were able to pay for material beyond that IIRC it was about $3.50 an hour. BUT we were running two printers that used very expensive proprietary cartridges. I spent months working on a secret project to reload those cartridges but was told to stop when the district got word that we were violating there agreement with the printer company... I'll stop rambling about school district politics now but the point of that was supposed to be, let the kids print a personal project. It will get kids invested in the class and give them a great motivation to learn the modeling software.

Im planning on letting them design and build there own parts, but right now we are having to use online freeware for modelling which isnt the best. I just convinced the IT department to load Autodesk Inventor on our computers so we should be able to do MUCH better design work.

We also have a printer with expensive proprietary filament (its an XYZ Da Vinci) but the first thing I told them when I started was that Id be hacking it to use regular filament. (The school cheaped out and bought the cheapest printer they could without considering the ongoing cost of using the more expensive filament.

This printer is also less than a year old, and Im about to have to rip it apart because it has a TON of calibration issues, the x axis doesnt step right, and the fan doesnt turn on....ever.

I also get what you mean about women in engineering. When I was fresh out of high school I was going to go to Embry Riddle in Arizona on an Athletic Scholarship (I lost the scholarship when I blew out my knee).
They had what they called the "Riddle Ratio" which measured the number of squirrels on campus to women on campus, the squirrels almost always had the highest number.

Reminds me of when I was back in school. I always was a hands on guy and my dad said I ought to take some machine shop. It was required back when he got his degree.

So I went to the first class and the teacher said you can make a v-block and clamp or a tap wrench.

I went to see him after class and said I don't need either of those but I have a lot of stuff I do need. How about I work on what I want but watch all the demonstrations? He agreed except no guns and no bongs.

Turns out there were several guys like me, some well up there in years. I ended up attending his two night classes off and on for fifteen or more years. That was over 15 years ago. He's retired now but I'm thinking of seeing if his replacement has the same attitude. Now I'll be one of those old guys.

Dunno what this has to do with the topic other than letting students work on what they want is important. Guess I'm showing my age.

I'd love to learn 3D printing in a classroom environment. I can make just about anything with a lathe and mill but ... yeah, printing would just be cool.

I'd be bored making simple crap like fidgets, though. I did design one that I've been trying to get a buddy to print for me. Uses a bearing from my son's RC car and carbide inserts as weights.

Shagoneer wrote:Im planning on letting them design and build there own parts, but right now we are having to use online freeware for modelling which isnt the best. I just convinced the IT department to load Autodesk Inventor on our computers so we should be able to do MUCH better design work.

We also have a printer with expensive proprietary filament (its an XYZ Da Vinci) but the first thing I told them when I started was that Id be hacking it to use regular filament. (The school cheaped out and bought the cheapest printer they could without considering the ongoing cost of using the more expensive filament.

This printer is also less than a year old, and Im about to have to rip it apart because it has a TON of calibration issues, the x axis doesnt step right, and the fan doesnt turn on....ever.

Hopefully you can get it calibrated. They're supposed to be a decent printer.

The printers our district locked into were Fortus 250 MC's. 45000 a piece without the decorative tower base...

After cleaning every part of the machine, doing a factory reset, multiple attempts each of manual calibration and electronic calibration, and printing the "calibration part" loaded into the printer to help it calibrate itself, I going to have to call XYZ and ask them how to fix this thing.

Probably with a new, expensive, part that you can only get from them. That's the way manufacturing machines go, ime.

It is probably the calibrated rotating oscillator attached to the fixed framulator by the gudenator valve.