3D Printing Has Begun!

Even though our laptop hasn't arrived yet, Mr. Gauthier has been bringing his to school to tinker with the 3D printers in order to get them to work.  That way, once we have our equipment, we should be all set to get started figuring out how students can take advantage of this awesome technology.

Here is a quick video showing the 3D printer at work:

In case the video isn't clear, the 3D printer really amounts to a super sophisticated glue gun. It uses plastic, called filament, and melts it through a super hot extruder.  Software and hardware give the printer the instructions of where the filament goes on either an X, Y, or Z axis.  If you designed your model appropriately, and everything on the printer was set correctly, you might just get something like this:

It is still a work in progress. A couple of the prints so far look like this:

The plan is to get all of the kinks worked out so that when we have the equipment, students can design and print with a high chance of success. The opportunities to reinforce math concepts through 3D printing are really excited, and as you can see, we can't start using these soon enough!