rapman-education's posterous

rapman-education's posterous

Dave White  //  A place for educators, teachers, lecturers and students to find "stuff" about RapMan,BfB3000 and BfB 3DTouch printers... The unofficial Blog by Dave White, Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of D&T in Clevedon School UK.

Feb 4 / 3:28pm

More product improvements with 3D printing by students

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 Following my previous blog post I couldn't miss posting about this product model by one of my students.

As you can see from the photos this student has tackled a project to design an improved pencil sharpener.

This is intended to be a non functional model exploring the ergonomics of the design and some aspects of the functionality such as the hinged waste bin and aesthetics.

A very promising project... I will hopefully post some more as it develops, so keep checking back here!

Filed under  //  casestudy   dt   printing   student  
Jan 16 / 10:34pm

Iterative designing for 3D printing

(download)

 One of my GCSE students (15 years old) decided that for his final project he would design a fitting to hold an iPhone on his bike handlebars. I think he must have seen one produced by another student last year and featured in an earlier post on my blog!

So he went away and started to produce some ideas using Google Sketchup I would have much preferred him to have used a proper CAD program for the reasons you will probably see later. Anyway, he finished his design, exported it to .stl format, created the gcode with BfB Axon and printed the first parts. As you can see they were far too big and chunky... This was a real surprise to him as in Sketchup the design looked ok. So, back to the drawing board! ... I wonder if he would have realised his mistakes if he had used Creo Elements/pro or Autodesk Inventor?

His next designs look far more promising, the size is better and somehow it all fits together... So what will the next version look like? ... Well, this is where the power of 3D printing lies. The simplicity, cost effectiveness and relative speed allowed this student to start down the road of an iterative design process. For this him it would have been almost impossible for him to test and visualise what his product would turn out like without printing his first draft design. The jump he made in improving his design would probably not have been possible if he had to have invested heavily in skill acquisition, time and materials for CNC milling. 

Filed under  //  Student   dt   education   printing   teachingandlearning  
Jan 7 / 7:09pm

Kideville. A 3D printing project in UK primary schools

Kideville is a fantastic 3D printing project for primary school children using 3D Systems Bits from Bytes printers.

This YouTube clip is an interview with Dejan Mitrovic talking at the Victoria and Albert museum in London, UK about his Kide project. Dejan talksabout using a 3D Systems, Bits From Bytes BFB3000 3D printer to build houses for his Kideville project. Each building is designed by a student in primary education before being draw in to a 3D CAD package and then 3D printed with the Bits From Bytes machine.
 
 
More details of the project can be found here http://www.kideville.com/
 
Filed under  //  casestudy   dt   education   printing   video