It’s evident that 3D printing has its place in education and will continue to have a significant impact in the classroom. Here are some of the ways 3D printing is changing the way our children learn:
The maker movement empowers students to design, tinker and build as a way to solve new problems. Sounds great, right?
If you’re helping your students learn CAD, it pays to know what to look for in student designs that might keep them from being successful prints. Especially if the “ah-ha” moment or failure on the printer might not be clear to them, or shared with them at all.
Here are some design issues commonly found in student prints:
1. Parts Not Touching
3D printing requires students to take an idea through a design and production process in order to complete a model. They can digitally design and modify their model on-screen, and revisit that design after testing and analyzing a printed prototype. Working through a process of trial-and-error in multiple dimensions provides students the opportunity to understand why and how their idea worked.
2. Very Little (or no) Surface Area Touching Build Plate
As we know, 3D Prints are made from the ground up. The first layer is responsible for sticking well (throughout the print) and holding still for the entirety of the print. If that first layer doesn’t do its job, the part will fail. Certain geometries (spheres especially) do not put much material on the plate on the first few layers. From left to right, the chicken foot, man on a sphere, and ring with a star on it do NOT offer good surface area or support for the layers that come after them.
The chicken foot will have decent adherence to the plate, but will not be good at supporting a large body or plastic part above it. The spherical object has very little space to adhere to the plate, and the ring has no surface area (touching the plate) at all.
3. Small Rotations or First Layer Not Flat
As stated before, 3D prints rely on a good first layer to support them for the rest of the print. The cube below is tilted 1 degree. It’s easy to miss from far out or a different angle, but if you inspect the object you’ll see that when building from bottom (lowest point) upwards, it doesn’t have the surface area to create a good first layer.
Another good example is of a multi-piece part. If students add features to their object, they could extend past the lowest point of the object, making them print first - and resulting in a small surface area with large overhangs in the subsequent layers.
An example of what a non-touching part looks like on the Polar Cloud “Build Plate”.
Van Morris, Director for the Polar Cloud, works with education leaders to implement the 3D printing in schools across the U.S.
Learn more about bringing 3D printing to your classroom at https://polar3d.com/premium