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.

Jun 9 / 8:31pm

A spin off from 3D printing

Today was one of those fantastic days…. I spent the day at Bath University with hundreds of Year6 pupils (10 and 11 year olds) racing model cars. The project is a bit like a junior version of the F1 in schools project…. The youngsters designed and made race cars using a Craft Robo (cutter/plotter) and produced a portfolio of their design work. The cars were fired down a 20m track using CO2 cartridges in about 1.5 seconds!!!

(download)

The school I have been working with entered 3 teams and although we didn’t make it to the finals at the Williams F1 team’s HQ we all had a brilliant time.

But where is the 3D printing spin off?  I have over the last year or so been working along with the guys from BfB to set up a class of car in the competition where the primary school teams could work with their local secondary school to print custom parts such as wheels, drivers or wings etc…. Unfortunately the current economic climate has meant that sponsors have had to pull out and we have not been able to get RapMan printers into the secondary schools. So the project is on hold….. unless a new sponsor steps in!.... any offers out there???

Anyway, as I’ve already said, we all had a brilliant day and the pupils have all had a fantastic learning experience… I wonder how many of them will now want to become engineers?

At the end of the day I asked the pupils in our teams to give me a WWW and EBI (What Went Well and Even Better If), they said….

WWW…. “We worked really well as a team even though we hadn’t worked together before”. “Working as a team we managed to achieve everything we set out to do”

EBI…. “…. If we could do this sort of thing more often”

Not bad comments from 10 year olds, eh!

Dave

(download)