3D Printing and Design STEM Academy Summer Camp

In addition to Outside the Box, I volunteered to lead a 3D Design and Printing class for the OSU STEM Academy this summer. This time I had Margaret Mellinger, the 3D print guru from the OSU Library, as a co-teacher. This class was 3 hours a day for 5 days and had fifteen students. I was told there was a wait list of at least that many more!
We started each class off with a short instructional or inspiration video:

• Will 3D printing change the world? https://youtu.be/X5AZzOw7FwA
• Powdered Printing https://youtu.be/kBHsfNDsbCs
• 3D Lithography Printing https://youtu.be/l3TgmvV2ElQ
• We are all makers: http://www.ted.com/talks/dale_dougherty_we_are_makers
• Digital Archeology https://youtu.be/ZJVY-CtveDs
• Limor Freid: That’s what makes it worth it. http://youtu.be/MSJVB_ouGmk

We also had a guest speaker, Kevin, an intern working with Margaret who does model rocketry and is working on a 3D printed Ironman mask. The students started with some tutorials in the web-based Tinkercad. We followed that up with taking a look at 123 Design. Later in the week we also looked at OpenScad. All these projects are free to use, and students were encouraged to continue their design work at home.
The kids had an hour of print time to work with, and they came up with some creative projects. They learned how to design for efficient prints, how and when to add supports, and how to slice projects into smaller units for printing. We also uses a Makerbot scanner to scan in small objects, and an X-box Kinect scanner to scan in a student.
In all, I think it was a very successful class. We learned a lot, and we got a lot of good feedback from both students and parents. I can't wait to do it again! Here is to the future of 3D design. . .