There’s something about seeing kids making things that just makes you think, “the future’s going to be fine.”

Here are some shots from the 3D Design/Printing workshop “On the Move”, hosted by MakerBot and NYU-Poly last week. MakerBot education wizards Liz Arum and Jon Santiago¹  were there to show kids ages 10-13 how to use free modeling software and a MakerBot to make mechanical parts like gears for larger moving objects.

 

1. Jon’s organization HTINK “provides academic enrichment programs and professional development services that connect Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) concepts to issues of environmental justice, community development and workforce readiness.” Find out more at www.htink.org [↩]

If you are an educator of some stripe or a museum professional, MakerBot wants you to know that we <3 you. Look, it’s on our store!

 

Be sure to get in touch with us to find out more. We have met tons of teachers and museum folks in the past several months who are spreading the joy of making to future generations. We want to make this easier.

 

A couple months ago we posted about the Fayetteville Free Library in New York setting some ground rules for how a MakerBot could best be incorporated into a public library.

It looks like another library has picked up the torch! The Killam Library at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, has an excellent resource page explaining The Replicator and how people on campus can use it. This library appears to be running a bit of a printing shop for the cost of $1/hour.

Students can submit .stl files through email or into a shared file space and go pick up the final products later. Nice!

Given the school’s focus on marine research, let’s hope there’s a big jump in the number of related tools on Thingiverse. Have they heard about Project Shellter?!

 

Man, talk about teacher appreciation. Here is a teacher I think we can all appreciate.

In late March, I got looped into a series of emails involving our Support guys and our Education team. As I read through the long thread, I learned that a man named David Brelsford down in Baltimore was making every effort to get his hands on some MakerBots. Not for himself, but for his students. As Dave put it, his is a group of “amazing kids,” but their school sits “in a pretty rough area, a lot of gang activity, drugs and crime.”

When The Replicator launched in January, Dave asked us directly what we planned to do with all the Thing-O-Matics in the BotFarm. A lot of these were being cycled back into R&D, but we still had a handful in limbo. Dave made us this deal: if MakerBot donated the machines to his school, he would give them all the TLC necessary to get them up and running, use them to teach his students about robotics and the thrill of making stuff, and report back to us on everyone’s progress. He and I made a virtual handshake, and not too long later he was up here in Brooklyn to pick up his three new Thing-O-Matics.

These three TOMs are now down at NAF Prep, where they sit in Dave’s Bot Lot. This is where he hopes to build some momentum toward a pre-engineering class at the middle school.

After a few weeks of having the TOMs down in Baltimore, I had a chance to catch up with Dave and check the group’s progress. He told me there is a “definite ‘really interested-almost psychotically’ group of 8” kids regularly stopping by the Bot Lot after school. Even the “principal is hooked on it as well. She came by the other day, and really saw how the kids would interact with the machines. We are now working on a way to make this a part of an actual class.”

So far, Dave and the students have done some “tuning as far as resolution, and optimal temps,” but are mostly trying to refine their workflow. As a teacher, he said it was crucial for the group to talk extensively about safety. He used the opportunity to get the kids practicing conversions from Celsius to Fahrenheit.

As for design, the group is testing a variety of programs. Tinkercad, Google SketchUp, and 3Dtin. Dave says he might be leaning toward 3Dtin and that SketchUp may have too steep of a learning curve to get the kids started with a MakerBot.

I’m looking forward to checking in with Dave and hearing how he’s using the Thing-O-Matics in his curriculum. He has shown so much drive and passion just in tracking down the machines themselves that I know he is going to be a great voice for MakerBotting teachers. One quick note I’ll share from him is that the presence of the program has already had a positive effect on at least one student’s behavior at school. Dave and Kyosha have spent a lot of time printing parts for a quadcopter. Can’t wait to see this!

If you’re a teacher and you use a MakerBot, I would love to share your stories and best practices. You can always email me.

 

A few months ago Jean Adams, a teacher from Castilleja School in Palo Alto, wrote to me about the OpenSCAD tutorials on our blog so she could use them in her classroom. ¹  Obviously, this got me interested, so I asked her to share more about her class:

I teach Honors Geometry at Castilleja, an independent girls’ school for grades 6-12 in the heart of Silicon Valley.  This year our school opened an “Idea Lab” in connection with Stanford’s Fab Lab and trained a group of teachers on several digital fabrication machines.  Among those machines was a cute, wooden MakerBot Thing-o-Matic.  I was immediately drawn to the homebrew feel of the community around MakerBot and frankly the machine reminded me of the Apple I.  A parent volunteer, Diego Fonstad, showed me the openSCAD program and I saw how wonderfully this software could help teach several concepts in my Geometry class.  I began to play with OpenSCAD by following MakerBlock’s tutorials on the MakerBot blog.  Eventually I adapted his tutorials for my classroom and my student’s learned OpenSCAD during two 50-minute class sessions.  They were then given time  outside of class to work on a final project which was printed on our school’s Thing-o-Matic.

The list of concepts that this project helped teach or reinforce is actually quite extensive.  During the year long course my students learn about union and intersection of geometrical objects, vectors, rigid transformations such as translation, rotation, dilation (scale in OpenSCAD), and the z-axis.  All of these ideas came together in the design of their OpenSCAD object.  Futhermore I teach a small amount of programming in the python language and their skills in that language transferred over directly into OpenSCAD.

Beyond any specific content learned through this project, I intended my students to practice using spatial reasoning.  A 2010 research report by AAUW entiled “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” presents research that shows women can dramatically improve spatial reasoning skills in a short amount of time in order to close the gap with men.  ”If girls grow up in an environment with opportunities  to develop their spatial skills, they are more likely to consider a future in a science or engineering field.”  I found that students struggled with thinking and rotating in 3 dimensions, but by the end of the project had developed a robust ability to rotate their OpenSCAD objects in their mind.

A nice (and accidental) side effect was the chance for students to express themselves creatively in math class.  Diego Fonstad wrote, “The detail and breadth of their output exceeded what was required of them to complete the project. This underscores their latent creativity and desire to build and also demonstrates how this exercise tapped their intrinsic motivation and truly engaged the students.”

Jean’s class have shared their designs on Thingiverse, including the cutest and pinkest R2D2 I’ve ever seen.

1. Seriously – what kind of class is teaching OpenSCAD?!  Are there any open seats left?! [↩]

“I think it’s really cool how you can actually hold something that you printed out in your hand other than it just being a piece of paper.”

Such a simple thing, but it really is a thrill you don’t understand until you’ve skeined and printed. Am I right?

Thanks for this fun window into your MakerBotting, Collegiate School!

NY Daily News has a great profile today about an Iraqi War veteran, Purple Heart recipient, and New York City College of Technology Class of 2012 Valedictorian.

Let’s add one more to the list: MakerBot aficionado.

Richard Fisher will graduate on June 4th with the honor mentioned above, but his path to that degree wasn’t so direct. As The Daily News piece points out, Richard was a “terrible student in high school who got serious about academics after his brush with death during military service in the [Iraq] War.” He never told me about that last part; only that he had served four-and-a-half years on active duty in the US Navy, and two-and-a-half in the Reserves. He has a two-week active duty stint on schedule before graduation.

Richard’s story jumped out at me not just because he is a cool example of a MakerBot operator — more on that in a second. What’s awesome here is how an uninspired high schooler turned his non-academic predilection for Making into an academic career of inspiring others.

During the Fall of 2011 and into the Spring of this year, Richard was a student teacher at I.S. 318, where his primary focus was a 6th Grade shop class. This was Richard’s first exposure to MakerBot, and 3D printing in general. The shop classroom had two MakerBot Thing-O-Matics, which Richard and his cooperating teacher Russ Holstein used as the centerpiece of a sustainability project. Richard told his students to develop a sustainable building, model it, and fill it with models of sustainable furniture.

This was really no small feat. Many “of the concepts associated with design and modeling are a bit abstract which presents a challenge when teaching children that young (11 and 12 years old),” Richard said. But the challenge didn’t deter the kids, it excited them. “Maybe it is their young age, but the [MakerBot Thing-O-Matic] was unanimously voted ‘AWESOME.’ Whenever they saw the light turn on in the printer or heard it start buzzing, everyone wanted to know what was being printed. What is it? How does it work? How long does it take?”

I asked Richard whether the boys or the girls took to the technology better, and he said there was really no difference.  And once they got going, the kids “dove right in. We really pushed them beyond what a 12 year old would normally be expected to do. I think that their ability to rise to the occasion was what I found most impressive. That taught me an important lesson: If you give [kids] the tools they need and push them to do more, with the right motivation, they will deliver.”

There’s a nice end to this story. Along the way, Richard started submitting his own furniture designs to a contest at 3DTin.com. Once the kids took notice of what he was posting, they voted for his designs, and Richard came out the winner. We blogged about this at the time without knowing any of Richard’s back story, and were excited then to award him a MakerBot Replicator for his first place finish in the contest. Now we’re even more excited: the guy who has already put his life on the line in the military now plans to donate his Replicator to whichever school he ends up at for his first permanent teaching job.

Why is the Replicator a good fit for the classroom? Because they’re portable and inexpensive; perfect for the classroom, he says. But there’s more to it. As the brother of a technology teacher and a budding one himself, Richard told me there is “so much more” to teaching technology than just computers. “It drives me crazy to hear the words ‘technology’ and ‘computers’ used interchangeably.”

We’re thrilled Richard’s future students will get a chance to engage with concepts of open source hardware, rapid prototyping, and personal fabrication. We couldn’t hope for a better ambassador!

 

While following links about the SparkLab we posted about earlier, I came across this high school in The Netherlands using a MakerBot!

Student assistant Serisma Parmesardien makes a nice point about hands-on learning:

Most people think a hands-on learning with technology is to get your hands dirty from plastics, metal and oil. But it is not like that. You can sit behind a set of devices with a suit and you don’t get a dirty hand.

So true, so true. In this manufacturing revolution, not only do we get to keep all our fingers, we get to keep them clean!

You may have heard that MakerBot Industries is in an exciting expansion mode right now, and as such several of us are brand new. Last Friday that newness was the good fortune of some high school students in Baltimore.

MakerBot 3D Modeler Todd Blatt, who joined us this week, was still in his hometown on Friday. Before moving, he says he knew he had to make a special trip to his old high school, Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School. Todd brought with him the MakerBot Cupcake from the Baltimore Node Hackerspace.

This is a huge deal for us here at MakerBot Industries. We strive for a world where every high school student has access to a MakerBot to print whatever their creative minds come up with. We also know that kids see the technology and get it right away.

As Todd tells it, word of the 3D printer hanging out in classrooms spread on its own down the halls of the school. It wasn’t just a few kids in the engineering class getting their first look at this technology, it was math students, art students, and teachers from those disciplines, not to mention the Principal herself. A bunch of kids filtered through to see what the buzz was all about, and as you can see from the pictures, it was all smiles.

Incidentally, this wasn’t a surprising reaction to Todd. He first became enthralled with 3D printing when he visited Northrup Grumman on a school trip in 11th grade. Now a dozen years later, MakerBot has helped bring down the cost of these machines so much that Todd was able to bring one with him and show a bunch of students on their home turf.

The kids chose to print their design of the school initials, BT, which looks like a B from the front and a T from the side view. The second picture shows the initials set into a heart design. Clearly these guys have nothin’ but love for their alma mater.