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.

Nov 4 / 12:56pm

Wind tunnel project for 3D printing

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A new Teaching and Learning resource for 3D printing on the BfB wiki...

Design and make a Wind Tunnel... This resource suggests ways to make a small wind tunnel using 3D printed parts and a few other odds and ends to test the aerodynamic forces on different models. Different models can be 3D printed and tested to compare their efficiency. This project will be suitable for Design and Technology, Science and maybe Mathematics.

http://wiki.bitsfrombytes.com/index.php/Wind_Tunnel

 

Filed under  //  crosscurricular   education   resources   teachingandlearning  
May 31 / 9:54pm

D&T erupts into Geography

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It was one of those days today where a "magic moment" happened in school. Isn't it just wonderful when this happens. One of my students who helped out with a presentation about 3D printing for a visitor earlier this week (see the earlier post "To baldly go") came to see me about his Geography homework... Really strange as I'm a D&T teacher! It turned out that he had to do a project homework about how a volcano works.

This student had started to make connections in his mind. He now knows a bit about 3D printing and he did some independent research and stumbled across the teaching and learning resources I published on the BfB wiki http://wiki.bitsfrombytes.com/index.php/Geography_-_Mount_Saint_Helens_Volcano ... So he downloaded the files and asked if we could print them... How could I refuse?

... And his Geography teacher was really pleased to receive models of Mt St Helen's before and after it erupted.

Filed under  //  crosscurricular   printing   student   teachingandlearning  
Dec 8 / 7:29pm

Colour 3D Printing

File

BfB 3D printers with multiple heads can print in multiple colours! 
Using BfB Axon software and suitable .stl files this is virtually automatic. Quite a few users of these machines have had a go and ok it's not a brand new capability but the technical guys at BfB have taken things a bit further and printed a huge globe .... Great for lessons where D&T meets Geography.
http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/forum/post/how-print-two-colours-new-touch-printer 
Filed under  //  crosscurricular   education   printing   teachingandlearning  
Feb 2 / 8:14pm

Crossing boundaries.

After the normal school day was over I had an extra lesson to teach today… only this was no ordinary lesson. As you may have probably gathered I usually teach Design & Technology but tonight I was crossing boundaries and venturing into the world of Geography.

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This “Masterclass” was a real new experience for me, not only was I tackling Geography but the students were visiting from another school. Ben Cotton from St Katherine’s School near Bristol UK brought three of his A ‘Level students and the head of the D&T Department to my school in Clevedon to have a look at our 3D printers and some of the teaching and learning resources that I have developed and made freely available on the Bits from Bytes wiki.

Whilst munching on M&M’s and Twizzlers,( kindly sent to us by 3D Systems Ltd)  we ran through the process of downloading satellite data, scaling and converting it for printing 3D terrain models on our RapMan and BfB3000 printers. And of course we printed a small version of the “after eruption” model of Mt St Helens. The students were fascinated by the process and I also learned a lot about pyroclastic flow, lateral blasts and also that volcanoes come in different varieties with strange names like strato, compound (or composite?) and shield…. Not bad eh? Especially when the last time I did Geography was as a pupil over 30 years ago.

We then moved on to look at a case study of a project to design a hydroelectric dam in northern Italy. This case study by Marco Giubelli of Sigma Designs used a RapMan printer to help the public visualise the environmental changes that would happen after the building of a new bigger dam.

And as if that wasn’t enough we managed to cram in a brief look at other Geography related projects and resources… wind turbines and architecture!

The students were fantastic and a real credit to Ben and St Katherine’s School. They were genuinely interested in the crossover between D&T and geography by using a RapMan and BfB3000 printer. They gave a “thumbs up” for the projects and resources and have shown an interest in following up this evening’s work with another session after their exams in the summer… I’m already looking forwards to this possibility.

If you are interested in doing this type of activity the resources that I produced can be downloaded from the BfB wiki.  http://wiki.bitsfrombytes.com/index.php/Teaching_Resources

Dave

 

Filed under  //  Cross Curricular   Education  
Jul 9 / 9:17pm

Print your own DNA

This time about DNA and the double helix.  http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/wiki/index.php?title=Science_-_DNA

Dna

This resource is heavily based on the work by "Cathalgarvey" on Thingiverse... my thanks to him for producing the .stl files (and to Bogdan for spotting them and realising it would make a good T&L resource)

Dave

Filed under  //  Cross Curricular   Resources   Teaching and Learning