This weekend, I goofed around in TinkerCAD. When I was in university, UBC Rapid (the 3D printer engineering design team) ran a competition called HY3P (Hack Your 3D Printer) which I entered with a team, and that was probably the last the time I did much around 3D printing.
Thinking about 3D modeling and printing from a teacher-librarian perspective, I feel like it’s really easy to fall into a “tech for tech’s sake” mindset and use this technology as a toy. It’s easy to either create trinkets with no real meaning or curricular value (like my little tag above) or use 3D modeling/printing in ways that sit comfortably in the Substitution/Modification level of SAMR, where we could have created a very similar work in traditional 3D materials. I’ve been trying to think of some ways that we can use this technology transformatively and meaningfully.
Remixing
Like with computational thinking, there exists a wide world of open source projects for 3D printing/modeling, on sites like Thingiverse. Instead of having students start from complete scratch, we can provide them with a starting point and have them remix others’ models. This mimics authentic practices in engineering – more often than not, you don’t create things from scratch, but use off-the-shelf parts and combine them with custom parts in interesting ways. We can tie in digital citizenship lessons around copyright and licencing at the same time.
Cheap Manipulatives/Models for Science/Math
(And probably other subject areas, but I’m not a specialist in those areas)
Again, the magical world of open source 3D models provides a wide range of physical mathematical and scientific models that education companies charge a lot of money for. For teachers, we can create things like Klein bottles, molecule models, and human skeletons for the cost of the filament and printing time.
Precision and Iteration
My thoughts, as always, steer towards engineering design projects. In some cases, students may want to build custom parts for mechanical devices that require precise measurements or interlocking with other parts. For example, a student might be creating a custom chassis for a battlebot. 3D printing is a cheap and efficient way to produce and test iterative models of these parts, as well as ensure that they fit precisely virtually before spending time and materials on the physical parts.This is a type of project where 3D printing demonstrably breaks the limits on traditional materials.
Sources
Kafai, Y. B. (2016). From Computational Thinking to Computational Participation in K-12 Education. Communications of the ACM, 59(8), 26–27. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1145/2955114
Makerbot Industries. (n.d.). Thingiverse. Retrieved May 09, 2021, from https://www.thingiverse.com/
R, C. (Producer). (2013, May 30). SAMR in 120 seconds [Video file]. Retrieved April 13, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us0w823KY0g