3D printers excite high school design students

3D printers excite high school design students

Have you ever wanted your vision to jump out of the page at you? Thanks to a special 3D printer, the three-dimensional visions of some students are coming to life, reports the Pioneer Press.

Students in the Intro to Engineering Design course at Highland Park Senior High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, had the chance to create 3D designs on computers and, with the use of a compatible 3D printer, saw their creations turn into objects they can hold in their hands. The printer was on loan from a local company.

Unlike the more common two-dimensional printer that prints flat on paper, the 3D printer builds objects by adding thin layers of material on top of one another. For the St. Paul students, that material happened to be plastic.

It took about eight hours for the printer to make senior Jason Crabtree's product, a block modeled after the state of Minnesota. He was disappointed, however, when the printer didn't reproduce the cities from his computerized project, exposing a flaw he made in his design.

Teacher Brad Moening, who was an engineer prior to entering the education field 10 years ago, said that Crabtree's disappointment was an important lesson for his students to take away from the project, a lesson that could only be illuminated by seeing their products in three dimensions before them.

"This really is hands-on geometry," Moening told the paper, adding that he hopes to permanently obtain one of the machines for his classroom, which sell for approximately $15,000 to $20,000.

Three-dimensional printing can do more than provide technology students with a lesson, however. The technique was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for rapid and flexible production of prototype parts, end-use parts and tools directly from computer-aided drafting models. According to MIT, 3D printers can create parts out of any material, including ceramics, metals, polymers and composites.

The devices work by building parts in layers as a slicing algorithm draws detailed information for every layer in a CAD model. Each layer begins with a thin distribution of powder spread over the surface of a powder bed, explains MIT. Using a technology similar to inkjet printing - minus the traditional ink cartridge or toner - a binder material selectively joins particles where the object is to be formed. The layer-by-layer process continues to repeat until the object is completed, following a heat treatment that removes any unbound powder.

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