Category Archives: 3D printing education

3D Printing News – Doodle 3D Transform

In a world where we can buy affordable 3d printers it can seem intimidating when it comes to creating your own 3D model for the first time. This is what the founders envisioned when they created their first successful Kickstarter for the Doodle 3d WiFi box with embeded sketch app (still available). For the first time you could not only use your fingers to paint a 2d sketch and extrude it into 3D you could send the design directly to your printer over USB. The WiFi box hosts an app that allows any touch interface like phones or tablets to be the modeling tool wirelessly. It’s much easier than it sounds.

The founders have improved upon the concept by releasing the Doodle3D Transform App, which runs a web technology-based app and forthcoming tablet app, pending a successful campaign. You can draw by hand, scan photos/drawings or import existing images. In addition to sending your design to your 3D-printer you can upload it to an online service like 3D Hubs for output, if you’re still saving up for a printer. But instead of being limited to single-walled prints you can create complex objects with the same simplicity of the original. Watch the video above and see all the capabilities on their campaign page.

I can’t think of a quicker or more fun way to get started in modeling! You can find out more about the features on the Kickstarter Page and more about their company on their website.

3D Printing News – 3D Prints for Teachers of the Visually Impaired

Pasted Image 9 7 16 12 00 PM

The above image shows solids that all have the same volume, you can check this by filling one with water and then pouring that water into the next, fixed-volume objects. You can use the OpenSCAD script that Rich Cameron (aka Whosawhatsis) shared or download the sample objects. But why? Rich Cameron and Joan Horvarth, well-known authors, are on a mission to get all the 3d printers in the world, in all those new classrooms to help visually impaired students make use of 3D prints to learn just about any subject, but they need help making good models. This is where you come in.

Start off by downloading the sample objects above or generating your own via the openSCAD script we mentioned. Then visit the project page on Hackaday.io to get instructions on how you can volunteer to help this community and join their Google Group to continue the conversation. This is a great tactile to learn and a great way to share your talents with the world.

“Often students with visual impairments have difficulty with concepts based on visual/spatial relationships, particularly in math and science. 3D prints offer an unprecedented asset for their teachers, and 3D printers are becoming affordable. But these teachers need help designing models. [Whosawhastis] and I have been volunteer mentors to various groups working on figuring out the best ways to use 3D printing for the visually impaired. Our goal with this project is to document some simple, practical conventions for designing models, and lay the groundwork so that interested parties can create the needed designs. We know that schools have 3D printers and want to teach design thinking to their students. This project creates a minimalist open-source way to link teachers who need design files and (sighted) students who want projects to do. We want students to create the designs for the needed models, learning science, math and other subjects while helping their visually-impaired peers.”

Pasted Image 9 7 16 1 40 PM

3D Printing News – 3D Printed Hair

(video via Futurism)

The amazing folks in the Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab have shared their research with creating the software to produce small hairs or Cilia from 150 to 50 micrometers to do things such as move, sense, adhere, or be aesthetically pleasing.

Looking into the Nature, hair has numerous functions such as to provide warmth, adhesion, locomotion, sensing, a sense of touch, as well as it’s well known aesthetic qualities. This work presents a computational method of 3D printing hair structures. It allows us to design and generate hair geometry at 50 micrometer resolution and assign various functionalities to the hair. The ability to fabricate customized hair structures enables us to create super fine surface texture; mechanical adhesion property; new passive actuators and touch sensors on a 3D printed artifact. We also present several applications to show how the 3D-printed hair can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.

Read the entire paper here and visit the project page for more fascinating images of this work.

Printing Your Own Hair
If you want to use your FDM printer to try out some hair-powered prints see the below projects.

Droolopp Tutorial
Drooloop flowers are produced by purposefully printing out in the air and taking advantage of sagging filament as an aesthetic feature versus the normal dreaded print failure. Read the tutorial and try out some flowers for your loved one that will never die, create fascinating Jellyfish and in a little different technique create a bottle brush!

Watch YouMagine for the Ultimaker Gumball Challenge pieces from Maker Faire Bay Area 2016!

Dragon Climber Toy

Keep your eyes peeled for a slew of new chibi designs popping up on YouMagine over the weekend.

The Ultimaker team invited four schools to participate in the Ultimaker Gumball Challenge.

River Bend Middle School, Virginia
Saint Ann’s School, New York
Comstock High School, Michigan
Advanced Learning Center, Utah

Each school was sent 1000 gumball capsules and some 3D-printing filament. Students designed and printed the models and decorated their machines.

All of the money collected in these machines will be donated to support STEM initiatives at the schools, and whichever school sells the most prints will also win an Ultimaker 2+ 3D printer!

Toy Catapult for Maker Faire

You Can Play Along From Home!

This Gumball Challenge joins a bold lineage of fun projects making use of dime store toy dispensers in combination with 3D printing, in particular starting with The Incredible 3D Printing Gumball Gallery art project from DesignMakeTeach who helped to shape this challenge and drew one of his local classrooms into the mix.

We hope that readers and Maker Faire Bay Area attendees both will go home inspired to try challenges like this with their own classrooms and communities!

Here’s the core challenge: “What original 3D printed designs could you create to fit inside a tiny two inch (five centimeter) gumball capsule?”

Want to encourage creativity and teach those new to 3D printing about design constraints? By placing a constraint on size, you encourage creativity and to problem solving. Challenge participants to design whatever they want, or choose a theme.

3 piece puzzle toy

More Gumball Capsules to Come!

Continue to check back for the designs labeled “gumball” on YouMagine in the coming weeks to see all of the student designs, and read more at: www.ultimaker.com/gumball

Visit these designs on YouMagine.com!

3D Printed Musical Instruments on YouMagine

People make a wide range of things with 3D printing and share them on YouMagine. A category that is perhaps a bit unexpected is 3D printed musical instruments. Below are some fun things to be found on the site that you can print.

This 3D printed mouth harp is a modern take on a very ancient musical instrument. Also called a Gogona, Dan Moi or a Kouxian.

Jeff Hertzberg who is a violinist made this violin mute that can also be used for other stringed instruments. His mute design comes complete with an OpenSCAD file so you can adapt it easily for other instruments.

Stringed instrument mute.

Cymon has made a number of playable recorders, including a tree recorder.

Michael Bourque made a 3D Printed Güiro, which is a Mexican percussion instrument.

Ed made a base drum pedal stopper showing us that you can repair musical instruments as well using 3D printing. He also made holders for drumsticks.

I really love Caitlin‘s Trumpet adaptive device that lets kids with a missing hand play the trumpet.

Prosthetic hand to let one play the trumpet.

David Perry at OpenFabPDX made the F F F Fiddle an electric playable fiddle.

Shapespear made a really nice looking playable electric guitar.

Results of the YouMagine 3D printing survey part 2

Previously we told you about the results of our community survey amongst 500 members of our 3D Printing community. This is the largest and most in depth desktop 3D printing survey conducted to date. Today we can share you the second part of this survey.

At YouMagine we want to enable collaborative worldwide innovation in 3D printing and build the tools to let people in a distributed way work together to create, remix and share open source technology. We call this Distributed Innovation and want to build the tools for our community to engage in letting more people make better things.

In order to make sure that we are building the right future we want to understand our community and get feedback on what we need to do better. Through this process of letting our community guide our roadmap and development we can also give people an insight into what is happening in 3D printing. We would like to qualify this information to a certain extent however because we would expect our community to skew towards people who have been involved with 3D printing longer & be more open source minded than a random sample of the 3D printing community.

We asked Alexey Butakov to make us some nice illustrations to show off some of the graphs.

What do we need to improve about YouMagine?

Probably the most important thing for our development is the above graphic. We need to improve search and navigation. We’re working hard on this and have adapted our roadmap to the findings. We also received a lot of individual feedback about bugs and issues that need addressing, we found this super helpful also. We’ve identified different types of users whereby we’re generally seeing that one group wants more interaction and collaboration whilst the other seeks quick access to many designs. We’re making lots of quick steps forward on improving our overal design and user experience.

What needs to be improved in order to make 3D printing better for you?

The main thing that needs to be improved is the reliability of the 3D printers. If we drill down into these numbers we can also see that certain issues such as bed adhesion and dialing in new materials is also an issue for people. Reliability not only encompasses machines and in order to improve the overal experience improvements in software, electronics, materials & machines will have to be coordinated. People also want larger build volumes and faster 3D printers. Cost is not an issue for many.

One thing affecting many is warping and bed adhesion. Here we see that it is still critical to get your first layer right. Rather than be a solved issue for many we can see people looking at many different strategies to make materials adhere to beds. The best strategy is also very material dependent and depends on if you have a heated bed or not. Over the past few years a lot of new types of materials have become available for desktop 3D printers. These have exacerbated this problem especially since the best bed adhesion solution differs per material. Personally I’ve taken to washing down my glass heated build plate with a dishwashing soap with a high alcohol content. This degreases it and makes for excellent adhesion. As a YouMagine team we are leaning towards using only soap but some still use glue or tape.

There is a wide distribution of bed adhesion solutions for 3D printers

We’re seeing that even though there are a number of products out there to solve the issues. Most people still use glue or blue painter’s tape. Hairspray is also quite a popular solution. There is still scope to as an industry make better beds or come up with better solutions to this issue. Bed adhesion issues and warping are still the leading cause of failed prints. It would make a lot of people really happy if someone solved this issue.

I hope you enjoyed these results, thank you so much to all who participated. The third and final installment of our survey results can be found here.

Scrufie the adorable obstacle avoidance robot on YouMagine

Scrufie the adorable Arduino powered ultrasonic sensor obstacle avoidance robot

In honor of our ELF VR Drone contest where you can win your own drone, I checked out some of the awesome robots on YouMagine. Rtheiss’ S.C.R.U.-F.E. is a “Simple C++ Robot with Ultrasonic-sensor” is a maze avoidance robot got printed when his, “two year old daughter fell in love with an old ultrasonic robot that I built in elementary school twenty five years ago. It’s missing parts and no longer works, but she has treated it with love since she was one year old.” “For her third birthday, I set out to make a sub $50 Robot with easily replaceable parts.”

Scrufie the adorable Arduino powered ultrasonic sensor obstacle avoidance robot, side view

“My daughter adores this Robot. She named him Scrufie” Rtheiss is a teacher and hopes that this great Arduino powered bot will help his school learn “C++ coding/programming and Robotics.” “The print time is about an hour for all five parts, requires 7 soldered connections (beginner level) and takes about 2 hours for a beginner to assemble.”

Scrufie looks sad sometimes

A lovely story and a great inexpensive bot for education! You can download the parts and look at the Bill of Materials here for this $50 bot.

Interview with Manon van der Sar about 3DPrint and education

Recently, at a 3Dhubs meeting, I met Manon van der Sar. She is the 3DHubs mayor of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and she likes to share her designs on YouMagine. Manon is a teacher and educational designer, just like I am. She has good ideas about how 3D print and 3D design can change our educational system! This is very exciting to me and therefore I would like to share some of her work and ideas with the YouMagine community.

Manon Mostert – van der Sar (25) is an entrepreneur (through Studio van der Sar) in the field of co-creation and digital fabrications. In 2011, Manon co-founded Fablab Rotterdam (linking Stadslab Rotterdam with Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences), together with other enthusiasts and experts. The establishment of this Fablab, a place where you can make almost anything, has formed the basis for most of Manon’s current activities.

Manon is still actively involved in Stadslab Rotterdam and is now investigating the (desired) impact of these new creative environments on education. Based on her belief that the education world is still lagging behind, she is engaged in the development of new educational approaches through active research (research by doing). She has already developed new courses and is currently a teacher for two minors in Rotterdam, the minor+ (honours education) ‘Making for Professionals’ and the minor+ ‘Experience Design for the Internet of Things’. On January 29, 2015 the students of this minor exhibited their work in the Smart Pop-Up Store in Rotterdam.

Besides working on innovative education at college level, Manon has set up a Teacher Development Team composed of secondary school teachers, together with Peter Troxler, to devise and discuss new ways of educating students and developing new teaching materials. This group of teachers has visited several labs in Rotterdam and the surrounding area, with support from Betasteunpunt Zuid-Holland, to gather inspiration for the development of new learning environments and teaching materials. The group’s initial findings have been described (in Dutch) in a small publication.

“The 3D printer is an outstanding device that allows us to easily make new things and that creates a different learning curve than we were used to in our own education. Many current educational organizations are not yet able to integrate this new type of learning (‘just in time learning’) into their existing structures. Together with teachers and policy makers we will need to find ways to offer current and future generations a suitable learning environment,” according to Manon Mostert. Manon is an advocate for new education who provides a great number of lectures and workshops for a variety of educational institutions in order to explore this challenge and to offer practical examples to boost innovation in education.

Call for teachers and educational designers

Are you in some way involved in education, e.g. as a teacher or an educational designer? Do have ideas about 3D print and Design can change (or even revolutionize) education? I am interested in what you are working on and how your students are involved in your project. Please don’t hesitate to contact me. Just send an email to: ronald (at) YouMagine.com.

Interview with Chris Thorpe from IcanMake

Chris Thorpe from the UK is founder and CEO of I CanMake and also YouMagine member. I Can Make creates educational content and resources on 3DPrint&Design for teachers, students and parents. Chris has uploaded a special Valentine’s Day-design in his YouMagine-account and that is a good reason to publish my interview with Chris and his team.

Left to right: Chris Thorpe, Mark Simpkins, James Richards and Dean Vipond (not pictured Becky Fishman).

Tell me something about your background
We’ve worked for publishers (like The Guardian, OUP and Macmillan), for media companies (like the BBC and Channel4), we’ve been part of BAFTA award winning teams and Chris is the former CTO of Moshi Monsters (a service used by 1 in 4 children in the UK).

How did is all start?
At MakerFaires when we took our 3D printed models of trains to Brighton, New York and Wales, we noticed we could have in depth conversations about engineering and 3D printing while the children put together the models, and the information stuck. We spoke to friends at Bethnal Green Ventures who funded us to build a product and have spent the last year developing services for teachers.

What are your Plans for the near future?
We’ve just joined the Wayra UnLtd academy in London (a joint venture between Telefonica and the Cabinet Office which supports social venture start-ups) and we’re preparing to teach our first courses for teachers about using 3D printing in the classroom. Our subscription service for schools full of downloadable models and lesson plans launches in Summer 2015 and we’re working on something fun for the home market in time for the holiday season.

Why is your service important for schools?
Our generation, and some of the YouMagine-audience, grew up playing games and learning to code on home computers like the ZX Spectrum. And collectively as a generation we’ve reframed commerce, media and communication.

Our children’s generation, if they get to play and create with 3D printers, will reform manufacturing, product design, engineering and the environment.

The problem is the grown ups are scared and often don’t know what to do with the machines. The grown ups I’m talking about are teachers and parents, and they’re the gatekeepers. If we can help them we can help to inspire the next generation of inventors and engineers.

How can our readers contact I Can Make in the UK?
Visit the IcanMake website, or talk to Chris on Twitter @icanmakehq.

ICT Talent Development Program with a focus on 3D Printing

In Amsterdam, an interesting education project called ‘ICT in the Clouds’, is producing very interesting results. This project (that started in 2013) is an ICT talent development program, for students in secondary schools (age 12 till 18 years). Some of the project partners are:

IBM,
KLM,
Cisco and
VU University Amsterdam.

One of the participating schools is Montessori group Amsterdam with a computer room full of interesting learning materials like Oculus Rift, an official First Lego League table, 3D printers, PCs and a Smart Board. I was invited to participate in a project meeting, where students and teachers cooperate on projects with a focus on topics like:

Robotics,
App-development,
Serious Gaming and
3D Printing.

Left to right: Robert Iepsma, Maurits van Bellen, Hakan Akkas, Marc Souwer, Eelco Dijkstra, Renee Witsenburg, Ronald Scheer and Laura van der Lubbe.

Maurits van Bellen and Robert Iepsma have been working for the ICT in de Wolken project for over two years, to assist students during class and develop new study programs.
Maurits and Robert are Master Artificial Intelligence students.
Hakan Akkes is teacher in this project.
Mark Souwer is co-founder of the project, together with Martin Rodermans (not in picture) and Ferd Stouten (not in picture).
Eelco Dijkstra is an advisor to the Montessorischool-board and project leader of ‘ICT in the Clouds’.
Renee Witsenburg is project assistant, she studies Computer Science at University of Applied Sciences of Amsterdam and she likes to develop teaching materials for this project, aimed at secondary level students.
Laura van der Lubbe also works on this project to help students and she is YouMagine member!

I interviewed her about this project, her work and her education, and this is what Laura told me. ”My name is Laura, I am a 3rd year Lifestyle Informatics student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This study is closely related to Artificial Intelligence. We study the way we can support people in their daily life with the help of technology. During my 2nd year I was asked to follow the Honours track. Which is an extra track for talented students on top of your normal study-load that gives you the opportunity to broaden and deepen your knowledge. For this track I did a project about 3D printing in education.

In my first project I studied the possibilities of 3D-printing in education. A second project resulted in a framework for a project that schools can do around 3D printing and creativity.

Education has always had my interest and because of my Honours project I decided I really wanted to work in the 3D Printing field. At the project ‘ICT in de wolken’ (best translate to “ICT in the Clouds”) I became a student-assistant and currently I am involved in an internship at a high school to see whether I want to become a 3D Print & Design teacher or do something else related to 3D Printing education.”

Youmagine Blog