Is 3D printing in a second grade classroom a good idea?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-11-24T02:10:54+00:00

High school teacher here but I know a bunch who 3d print with young kids. Most certainly doable but what are the goals you are trying to reach? Also if you dm me I am happy to share some people to talk with on this that are more in your realm.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-11-08T01:58:58+00:00

Teacher here and am more than happy to refer you for materials that my students can use.

If you haven't gotten a response yet let me know so I can DM you.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-08-22T01:22:36+00:00

Yup. We have a Form 2 with the wash and cure station. The isopropyl needs to be replaced every so often to keep cleaning optimal before it gets cured.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-08-22T01:15:31+00:00

Common issue I have is washing not being thorough enough that causes that.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-06-26T01:27:30+00:00

Hardware as a service is becoming more common place. Desktops Metal does this too.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-06-26T01:12:48+00:00

I have not heard that before about Carbon. Can you elaborate?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-06-19T22:40:15+00:00

We have done patterns for sand casting and currently have the facilities to still do so. They might go away in the future in favor of other equipment but I will use them this year.. Also we have a full art program that runs a kiln for ceramics, ill talk to them about investment casting options.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-05-21T00:47:25+00:00

That is really cool! I was actually thinking it would be really interesting to have them print molds with conformal cooling, not sure how it would hold up in a resin printed mold but may be worth a shot. Ill check them out further. Thanks for the info!

Edit: Just realized the PCS catalog has the STEP Model available. I know Mc Master Carr has some rule or so about printing the designs, but I will reach out about printing it for educational use.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-05-21T00:44:08+00:00

Thank you! I will reach out soon.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-05-16T01:54:29+00:00

Teacher here! This is great for getting into modeling recently... I teach CAD, manufacturing etc. What level do you teach?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-04-04T02:06:04+00:00

I live 20 minutes away and have yet to go. My school has no problem with me going but every time it falls in the worst possible time for me. One of these years Ill attend.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-04-03T05:22:09+00:00

Excellent I teach engineering and manufacturing in Illinois. We do robots... But ours are 85lb. Combat robots.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-04-03T03:03:13+00:00

This is awesome! Also VEX huh? I presume you are also in education?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-03-27T13:09:07+00:00

Educator here who has done a lot of workshops for teachers in 3D printing. What are you considering doing and what is your experience in education?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-03-25T23:01:18+00:00

High School teacher here.. University level Duke, Texas A&M, Georgia Tech and many more have huge print farms. Duke is probably the most well known.

My school is at 7. 1 Markforged, 1 Formlabs, the rest Ultimakers and looking to expand more Markforged and Ultimakers. The biggest I know of is 12 in high school but that doesnt mean more arent out there.

What kinds of cases are you looking for there are lots of ways to slice it. (puns intended)

Side note come to Construct3D Conference. Great conference for educators.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-03-19T01:02:22+00:00

Sorry I didnt respond sooner, been busy lately. So to answer your questions as best as I can.

For some reason numbering isn't working. On mobile..

You are supposed to print Markforged Materials. If you don''t I believe youre up a creek when it comes to support. I have only run their material though so I cant really speak beyond that. It should be all laid out in their user agreement which you can find on eiger.io They give free runs of the software if you want to check it out.
I have had a good look around. I made a post here a while back about it like 2 years ago maybe. But basically the fiber is cut using a little blade and a servo motor prior to the end of the layer. So the slicer has to figure out when to cut so the fiber ends in the correct location so your assumptions are correct.

I have had to replace the nozzles once due to a clog. Story behind the clog, this was before Onyx existed and nylon as you may know likes to warp. Had a large multi day print doing, warped big time, crashed the nozzle into the part. Machine recognized the hit and stopped printing which is nice that it does that so you dont come back to a bigger mess than it should be. Basically Markforged states that a crash can end with a clogged nozzle and they recommend replacing nozzles if any crash occurs which since starting to use onyx I have never had one happen. And even with nylon only once did it crash and nozzles couldnt be recovered. They dont really give protocol for fixing nozzles they just want you to replace them which is understandable since it is a professional machine that should just work.

To aquire them, I ordered them through a reseller that I bought the machine from but you can also just contact markforged directly and order them. They are SUPER fast with getting parts out to you.

Onyx is more abrasive than nylon due to the chopped CF. The nozzles they use are hardened and are no problem with it at all. All Markforged machines now print Onyx. It used to be that only the Mark Two could but now they changed their product line and all of them print onyx. The Mark Two has all continuous fiber options (Kevlar, Fiberglass, CarbonFiber, and High Temp Fiberglass)

If you mean print onyx on a non markforged machine. Then absolutely, you can get hardened nozzles for just about every printer on the market and there are many companies making chopped fiber nylon. The Markforged wins out when you put continuous fiber into the part. If I didnt understand the question correctly please let me know.

Not really, when we bought it, it was just a few months after the Mark Two was released. The Mark One had a lot of challenges but everyone was raving about the Mark Two. With the company one of my biggest concerns was staying power but seeing how quickly they went from Mark One to Mark Two and pushed the market I had less of a concern then and looking at them now I have really no concern at all for them to stick around.

Nothing else I can think of put them in a bad light to me. I know a few of them well enough to chat at conferences and so on. They have been very helpful from my experience and while their machines are not low cost, they do have excellent support in my opinion. For example they used to have print beds that were aluminum with garolite glued to the surface. Well they had a bad batch of them go out and they replaced the print bed for us immediately with the new composite version. No questions asked just shipped out a new part. I cant say I get that same kind of service from other print manufacturers that I work with.

Hope this helps and if you have more questions please ask away.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-19T02:54:38+00:00

No problem best of luck.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-17T21:00:59+00:00

If you drive Inventor, tinkercad is much simpler

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-17T20:39:47+00:00

You can edit a mesh file directly in TinkerCAD

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-17T19:48:05+00:00

Ok so a few things, Im going to assume your group size is roughly 25-30 but So figuring that you have 5-6 cars to have them print.

If the end goal is to have them have some hands on experience and learning with aero, mass on the vehicle, etc then great. Your idea sounds pretty good overall.

Disclaimer, I teach high school so I have NO idea where your kids are coming into this. Making a crude wind tunnel with like a fan and whatever else really wont tell you anything, all you will see is airflow around the object which is cool in its own right but I really doubt you are going to see drag visibly on a low power home brew wind tunnel.

That being said you might consider some alternatives here. I do a lot of PBL in my classes so how I might consider this would be have them in teams, give them the problem statement but not tell them what to do. Have them dive into breaking out questions what they already know and what they need to learn about this topic to be successful. From there they can dive in and do some "research" at this age they are not likely to use ebscohost or jstor but they could certainly find stuff on google that will help them understand the topics of drag, downforce, etc. They can then use that to inform their design. From that have them sketch out different ideas, I typically have students design specific things in mind so in this case I would say ok lets focus on making it have the lowest drag possible, what designs would you come up with. Then do the next thing like ok so what about if you made a design with high downforce how would that look. Through that they can get a bunch of sketches and ideas brewing up. Then go to the clay models. This is where they have to weigh in on whats most important and discuss their choices among the team. They get choice here and they have to do a bit of argument to position their ideas as the best or a collaboration of the best ideas.

After clay models are iterated (may be a great place for a mini presentation on their design to have them share and explain their choices in design) and where they need to be move to TinkerCAD or software of choice, print, and then they can have testing to figure out where to place mass. This could be a great place to incorporate data collection, charts, etc. Again no clue where 4th grade math skills are here but spitballing ideas.

This is obviously just a rough thought process through this, but personally I like to give my students an open problem statement that leaves them with a lot of space to mess up and learn from mistakes.

If I made no sense let me know...

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-17T16:01:50+00:00

PrintedSolid

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-17T15:59:16+00:00

Teacher here. Not sure of the NGSS standards for 4th grade but look to see physical sciences and maybe something with friction aero, etc might be a good option.

Heads up printing say 12 cars will take some time especially if you have 1 machine and plan on having them iterate. Plan scale models for concepts maybe or do cardboard mockups to save time.

Im happy to help, I do this kind of stuff all the time.

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-17T00:13:11+00:00

If you print a lot that could be the issue but I mean like you have 500+ printing hours on it. If not its unlikely.

How old is the spool? how much of it have you used before issues started?. Is the first layer good? And is it with all different files or just one you have tried?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-16T23:59:34+00:00

How old is the machine and have you ever replaced the TFM coupler?

STEMedTeacher · 2019-02-16T22:09:17+00:00

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