When will my (3D) prints appear?

With 3D printers, we are able to address problems we have never solved before. In the medical and engineering professions, we are seeing real advances in understanding because of the affordances of additive manufacturing. Doctors can 3D print a heart or other organ to see exactly what they need to do to treat a disease. Engineers can get to the crux of the problem by 3D printing a structure or part of a machine to find new solutions. Architects, designers, food technologists and also the military, are discovering the benefits of creating 3D versions of reality. But what about the teaching profession? How can teachers harness the potential of 3D printing? What are the barriers to adoption of this new technology? Is there an emerging 3D pedagogy?

In conversation with teachers I have learnt that one of the biggest problems of 3D printing is the speed with which the machine renders an object. Some teachers have pointed out that in a lesson of less than an hour, not much can be achieved when the machine is sat there chugging away, laboriously printing an artefact layer by layer, one or two microns every few seconds. Speeds will increase as the technology develops, possibly to the same level as the Star Trek replicator (Earl Grey, hot!), but until that time, how will the 3D printer fare in the standard school classroom?

In Twitter conversations yesterday, we discussed the speed of 3D printing. My view is that there is something of a fascination with the slow burn layer by layer building of an artefact. When 3D printer technology eventually attains the speed of the Star Trek replicator, where objects appear instantly, will this effect be lost? Although teachers argue for a quicker rendering of 3D objects to maximise lesson time, isn't there a good counter argument that watching an object slowly materialise inside the printer an opportunity for students to think and reflect on their concept, and appraise their work. Slow learning has some merits and is growing into a significant aspect of pedagogy. There is also a sense of achievement, when students finally get to hold the object they designed, scanned and 'made themselves'. I suggested that perhaps a speed regulator should then be built into the design of future 3D printers. When I spoke to the Ultimaker team yesterday, they told me that regulators were already fitted into current machines. I'm glad we're thinking along the same lines!

Photo by Jonathan Juursema on Wikimedia Commons


When will my prints appear? by Steve Wheeler was written in Preston, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.