3D Printing Education Book

As many readers will know, this blog came about when I started my post-graduate studies at university focusing on 3D printing. My knowledge allowed me to get into lecturing, and part of this role has allowed me to run workshops for the community, including school teachers, secondary students, and the broader public. It turns out these experiences have taught me a thing or two about running 3D printing workshops in short time-frames, often with people who have never seen a 3D printer in action, and has lead to me publishing a chapter in a book detailing how I organise a one-day 3D printing workshop.

The book is called Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives on 3D Printing in Education, and includes 14 chapters from leaders around the world on the topic of 3D printing in education. My particular chapter is called Re-Educating the Educators: Collaborative 3D Printing Education, and calls attention to some of the many real challenges that plague teachers who are attempting to adopt 3D printing in the classroom. The chapter starts with a summary of how Australian schools are adopting the technology, and moves on to new research and peer-reviewed literature about how short, intensive courses are helpful in offering teachers meaningful training in regards to 3D printing. The later section of the chapter provides the organisational structure and hands-on activities I use in my workshops, and is hopefully useful to many other people who are running training programs for teachers and others interested in 3D printing.

A big thank you to Sarah Saunders at 3dprint.com for writing a great article about my research which you can read here. The article provides a nice summary of the book which I hope will help it reach a wide audience, as there is not enough material available for teachers, curriculum planners and education researchers wrestling to bring 3D printing and other technologies into the classroom. This book at least goes some way to presenting the latest research ideas and data to fill this gap.

Please help spread the word to anyone who may benefit from this book on 3D printing in education, and use my 50% discount code “IGI50” to purchase the whole book, or just my chapter, at a generous discount 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

Organic Models Grown in Grasshopper

During November 2017 I was lucky enough to be involved in a 2-day workshop run by Lionel Dean from Future Factories. Lionel has been working with 3D printing for many years, and his work is very inspirational – I’d recommend taking a look at his projects which all use algorithms to generate complex, one-off products often 3D printed in precious metals like gold. The projects really highlight the capabilities of 3D printing and push the boundaries of what is possible.

The workshop focused on using Grasshopper, which runs as a plugin for the 3D modelling software Rhino. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve probably seen a few videos and demonstrations as I’ve been learning the program, including my successful Kickstarter earlier this year. The video above is the final simulation produced by the end of the workshop, which was an exploration of mimicking natural growth processes, similar to a sprouting seed. It’s not perfect, but definitely highlights the opportunities of using algorithms to design, as opposed to manually creating a singular static form. In Lionel’s work, he often uses these forms of growth to allow people to essentially pause the simulation and have the particular “frame” 3D printed as a custom object.

For any fellow Grasshopper geeks, above you can get an idea of the code used to generate these sprouts. There is no starting model in Rhino, it is entirely built from this code. Hopefully this will influence some future projects…

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printing Workshops Galore

University and school might be winding down for the year, but I’ve been as busy as ever running workshops on 3D printing and attending conferences – the silly season indeed!

I was a mentor at an event called GLO@Logan, a 3-day startup style workshop for teams of year 9 students from high school’s around the Logan area of Queensland. The project briefs looked at the future of health care, and how technology can be used to better enable people suffering from debilitating disease or age-related problems. A huge congratulations to the team from Loganlea State High School (top right image) who won first prize for their mobile app (which they actually created using MIT App Inventor) which was designed for people in wheelchairs to plan their route to restaurants, bringing in Google Street View images and reviews to help them plan their trip and locate wheelchair friendly restaurants. I was very impressed to see that within a couple of hours of the day 2 practical workshop they already had a rough prototype working on a tablet and had divided tasks nicely within their team. It’s very rare to see a group work so well or efficiently at university, so well done!

For some students like those from Flagstone State Community College, this was also their first opportunity to see a 3D printer in action – and they embraced the technology immediately. You can see their prototype in the top middle image which combines 3D printed pieces, Lego Mindstorms EV3 and a mobile phone, the idea being a robotic dog to act as a companion for elderly people including the capacity to make emergency calls should the person fall and injure themselves. Congratulations on winning second place.

I really hope to see some of these students come through the design courses at university, the ideas and prototypes of all groups were as good, if not better, than many I see from university students.

We also ran a 3D printing workshop at the CILECT Congress 2016 (the International Association of Film and Television Schools Congress), and what really amazed me is that none of the people who attended the session had ever seen or used a 3D printer before! I really thought film and 3D printing went hand-in-hand these days, particularly when you see the work of Legacy Effects in major movies like Iron Man and Robocop which rely heavily on 3D printing. But from the feedback I think the workshop definitely opened everyone’s mind to the potential of the technology, and need for it to be brought into the education of future film makers.

Most recently Createworld offered the opportunity to meet with educators and practitioners at the intersection of design and technology over 2 days of presentations and workshops, and this was also the first showing of the InMoov robot hand I’ve been building over the last few months (click here to check out the full development of this project). It now has a plywood stand which is great for hiding all the raw electronics. I also used my Wiiduino project from last year to showcase ideas like gamification, visual programming languages and customisation for 3D printing, alongside a few students from my Human Machine Interfaces class and fellow PhD researchers. I look forward to this event growing even bigger next year, it’s early days for this conference but the ideas and projects are very high quality.

Lastly a sneak peek inside the new 3D printing facility at Deakin University Waurn Ponds campus, where they have everything from desktop through to metal 3D printers and everything in between. The top left image is overlooking just some of the 3D printing facility, with more equipment in other rooms including a Virtual Reality room and labs for building robotics. I was there for the DESTECH conference and was blown away by the facilities, like a kid in a toy store! There are plenty of high-profile research projects coming out of here already so watch this space.

Looking at my calendar over the last month it has been a whirlwind of events, and it’s finally time to sit back, unwind and process it all over a few (or more!) drinks in the lead up to Christmas. 2016 has shown that 3D printing continues to grow and inspire, and I’m finally seeing some positive steps within schools, although there is still a long way to go. My printer has been running pretty constantly between these events so stay tuned for some project updates very soon.

– Posted by James Novak

June Events

It’s been a busy month for me and 3D printing even though it’s meant to be the mid year break from uni! Above are some photos from a full day 3D printing workshop I ran for a local high school in our new 3D printing lab, with a handful of students all being exposed to CAD, 3D printing and 3D scanning for the first time. By the end of the first session each of them had their first small design 3D printing over the lunch break, which just shows how quickly young kids are able to pick up this technology. We were also able to demonstrate for the very first time one of our brand new chocolate 3D printers, the Choc Edge. Yes that’s right, a chocolate 3D printer! I’m sure it won’t be long before everyone has something like this on their kitchen bench, but for now if you want to see how they work, come along to our Gold Coast campus open day on July 24th where we will have 3 in action for your sugary delight!

Last night I was really privileged to be a speaker at an event called DRIVEinnovation, hosted by the Brisbane West Chamber of Commerce. As the name suggests, the discussion was all around innovation, and how businesses can better adopt new technologies and keep up with the rapid changes across all industries. I was part of a panel with Ty Curtis from local augmented reality company Activate Entertainment, and Sam Forbes from cloud services company 6YS. The questions were certainly challenging in the short time-frame (how do you even begin to describe how to innovate in just a few short minutes?), but it’s really great to see such an active council asking these questions and building a community of very talented people. There were even some virtual reality and augmented reality demonstrations (that’s me in the right photo looking at a human skeleton with augmented reality). If you’re in the local area, it’s definitely worth following the Chamber through email or social media as these events happen every few months.

Coming up next week, and running over 2 weeks, are some intensive workshops at Griffith University for teachers. The workshops run in 2-day blocks, costing $180 (which also allows you to bring a student for free), and are on the following topics:

• InDesign (beginner and advanced)
• Photoshop (beginner and advanced)
• 3D Animation (beginner and advanced)
• Games Design (beginner and advanced)
• Hand Lettering
• 3D Design
• 3D Printing (beginner and advanced)
• Design Modeling Techniques

I will of course be running the 3D printing workshops, and there will be 2 levels of workshops each week: Workshop 1 is for beginners to CAD and 3D printing, where people will get to build a functioning product assembly. Workshop 2 is for more intermediate users who have some experience with CAD and 3D printing, and we will be combining this knowledge with 3D scanning to create wearable devices. If you’re interested, get in touch and I’ll pass on details to the administrator organising the event.

– Posted by James Novak

Spreading the 3D Printing Bug

Another weekend, another 3D printing workshop. This is my third year at Griffith University as a lecturer, and my third year running these weekend workshops on 3D printing for local school teachers to help answer their questions, teach them CAD, and get them hands-on with some 3D printers so that they can take this knowledge back to their schools. Definitely a great feeling to turn a few more people into fellow 3D printing geeks like me!

Within an hour of running the group through the basics of Solidworks, everyone was printing their first little key ring designs, all unique, and for them a really exciting moment to see their first design being produced on our Up Plus 2 printers in our brand new 3D printing lab. I couldn’t drag them away while their parts printed out! But I don’t blame them, I still love watching the printing process.

We then moved onto some more complex designs for some lattice chess pieces after a suggestion from one of the teachers, and eventually found our way to creating some designs around a 3D scan of an arm.  Combined with an analysis of what’s happening in the world of 3D printing, some of the theory, and the future careers some of their students may be interested in, I’m quite sure this was a very big day for everyone!

We will be running some more comprehensive workshops at the beginning of July over 2 weeks (during the school holidays), so keep your eyes on my blog for details when I confirm details with the uni. Teachers can even bring 1 student for free, so this should be a lot of fun.

– Posted by James Novak

Finish Line in Sight

Just an update on the Mario Kart Trophy progress – today all the 3D printed pieces have been spray painted in a chrome colour, and assembly has begun. As expected the paint really highlights the layers and any flaws in each part, but without spending a ridiculous amount of hours using acetone, or the more traditional fillers and sanding, this can’t be avoided. And there’s nothing wrong with celebrating the fact that this is a one-of-a-kind 3D printed product! Plenty more araldite to go, but the finish line is in sight.

– Posted by James Novak

Trophy – Timber Pieces

Just a quick update on the Mario Kart Trophy I started CAD modelling yesterday – I’ve laminated some 12mm particle board together to form a 24mm thick piece, and cut the ring and base pieces to size with a very dodgy jigsaw. The first coat of a ‘Golden Oak’ stain and varnish is on (just what I had lying around) which makes me think I might paint the 3D printed pieces silver rather than my original idea of gold for better contrast to the timber. 3D prints to begin this week.

– Posted by James Novak