Adventures in Educational Experience Design

Today I spent an inspiring and enlightening eight hours at the New York Hall of Science for the Making Meaning Symposium. The goal of the symposium was to explore ways that educators can assess the learning that occurs when students participate in making activities in formal and informal education settings. To this end, six experts in education and engineering spent a full day at the Maker Faire over the weekend with 11 young makers. These “Instigators” were served with the difficult task of working with and interviewing these young makers to examine how we can assess their learning through making. Today about 100 experts from around the world gathered to discuss and synthesize the data collected during these studies.

Of those 11 young makers, I have had the great pleasure of teaching or collaborating with 8 of them. This is no coincidence. The Hall of Science asked my colleagues and I to nominate young makers for the program. I guess it was inevitable that I would be sensitive to the results of the studies, especially when unavoidable questions arose regarding the decisions of the teachers and techniques used in their classrooms.

A question that came up about one group of my students was why they did not get to print their own 3D designs, but instead sent their teacher the files for printing. This is a great question. At the risk of sounding defensive I want to immediately address and answer so that others can recognize and help me figure out some solutions to the challenges that any teacher who uses 3D printing faces.

In our FabLab, we have six MakerBot Thing-o-matics. Homemade from kits, these are an early generation 3D printer. Some were built by me, some were built by my older students. These machines are notoriously fussy. Each machine has its quirks that the operator needs to be aware of. Even for experienced operators, the printing success rate is nowhere near 100%. Unfortunately, with these machines, printing is not as easy as pressing a button and coming back later to pick up your print.

To go from 3D design to physical print, there are several steps, including converting the file type twice, entering the several settings that are particular for that model, machine type, and material, and physically transferring the file on a SD card. Once you have prepared your model for printing, the printing process itself can take from five minutes to over seven hours. With more than 200 students coming through my classroom each week, all wanting to print their designs in our 45 minute periods, you can start to get a sense of the challenges that we face. Furthermore, when the printers are operating during class, I’ve found that the noise and the movements of the printer can be very distracting for many of the students.

Over the past year, I’ve struggled with these challenges and my solution has been to have students send me their files and I print them either early in the morning, or in the afternoons and evenings. Of course this is not sustainable. I’ve often felt like a one man printing bureau.

This year I’ve decided to tackle this challenge by collaborating with all of my students on a handout that describes the steps to go from design to printing. I wrote a first draft and my students have been suggesting excellent changes for the second draft. We are going to continue this process until we have a handout that anyone can follow. Then we will publish it online. I’m not convinced that this will completely solve the problem. The fussiness and quirks of each machine will likely still get in the way. But we have to try. And our efforts will hopefully help other teachers that want to use 3D printing in their classrooms.

We are also in the midst of converting a walk-in closet in the FabLab to a 3D printing “room” so that we can print while I am teaching without becoming distracted by the noise.

Today as I left the symposium I was thinking about these challenges as I received a message from my friend and fellow “maker teacher”, Andrew Carle. He pointed me to a blog post that addressed some of the very things that were going through my head at that moment:

http://indieschoollib.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/teaching_makerbotting/

This librarian is struggling with students who just want to print designs that they download from www.thingiverse.com. This educator recognizes that this approach leaves out the most valuable part of 3D printing: the 3D design process itself. The concern is that this approach turns “these kids into consumers rather than makers.” I completely agree. This is why I don’t even tell my students about Thingiverse (or other 3D model repositories) until they’ve spent at least one year designing their own objects on tinkercad.com.

I just want to end this post by pointing out that in some senses, 3D Printing is the least educative part of the process. Each brand and model of 3D printer has different steps and interfaces for going from 3D CAD model to print. It’s the actual 3D computer aided design process itself that most transfers across digital fabrication tools. That’s why I will continue to focus on that aspect in my classroom.