Canadian Teacher and ‘Printrbot Learn’ Propose a 3D Printing Curriculum

IMTS

Share this Article

3D printer manufacturer Printrbot’s educational initiative, dubbed Printrbot Learn, has an assignment for you: Help them construct via a living document a 3D printing curriculum. The company created Printrbot Learn to encourage schools to incorporate 3D printing in their curricula.

logo-PBLearn-50pxAt the helm of Printrbot Learn’s blog is Clarence Fischer of the tiny town of Snow Lake, Manitoba in the north of Canada. Fischer, who was a teacher at Snow Lake’s small school for 20 years, keeps his remote town at the edge of technological development. He was interviewed by the New York Times and CNET when the kids in his classroom became some of the world’s first bloggers.

clarence fischer

Clarence Fischer is keeping his students in Snow Lake, Manitoba, Canada in the center of 3D printing technology.

Fischer’s passion for technology led him to 3D printing and to Printrbot, the modest but successful company based in Lincoln, California. Printrbot sells affordable 3D printers and offers what they call “maker kits,” which are printers plus accessories to encourage the project-minded. The Canadian teacher’s zeal is apparent in the blog he writes for Printrbot Learn, where he issued his appeal for help creating a 3D printing curriculum for school kids.

“Something that has come up repeatedly over the past six months that Printrbot Learn has been active,” writes Fischer, “is the lack of quality, organized curriculum to do with 3D printing and manufacturing.”

Although he points out that the 3D printing community is beginning to address this issue, the curricula proposed by some companies — he uses Stratasys as an example — are specific to certain 3D printers rather than being broader if not more general.

Fischer also believes there is a sort of conflict of interests for companies that reach out to schools but do so while promoting their products. He suggests that the people on the ground — those doing the work in schools, from kindergarten through college, should be collaborating to produce a cohesive 3D printing curriculum, which would be adjusted to an extent based on the age of the students.

“In the end,” explains Fischer, “this document should have outcomes for students of different ages in each section. It can also link to outside resources, projects and information to support the outcomes and the learning that we want to see.”

printrbot curriculum main

The resulting 3D printing curriculum, an ongoing group effort and open document — or, really, series of documents — would ideally be licensed and released via Creative Commons. Fischer encourages those people who would like to contribute to this project to “highlight the possibilities that 3D printing brings to entrepreneurship and manufacturing.” His Google document, which he invites others to edit, to add their own ideas, has a basic structure that includes simple “how tos,” the sort of “A-B-Cs” of 3D printing.

The enthusiastic educator believes in opening his classroom in a remote corner of Canada to the outside world, where students will surely be headed once they leave his school, fully prepared to engage with the high-tech future.  Let’s hear your thoughts on this initiative in the PrintrBot Learn Curriculum forum thread on 3DPB.com.

Share this Article


Recent News

Will There Be a Desktop Manufacturing Revolution outside of 3D Printing?

Know Your Würth: CEO AJ Strandquist on How Würth Additive Can Change 3D Printing



Categories

3D Design

3D Printed Art

3D Printed Food

3D Printed Guns


You May Also Like

Featured

Pressing Refresh: What CEO Brad Kreger and Velo3D Have Learned About Running a 3D Printing Company

To whatever extent a business is successful thanks to specialization, businesses will nonetheless always be holistic entities. A company isn’t a bunch of compartments that all happen to share the...

Würth Additive Launches Digital Inventory Services Platform Driven by 3D Printing

Last week, at the Additive Manufacturing Users’ Group (AMUG) Conference in Chicago (March 10-14), Würth Additive Group (WAG) launched its new inventory management platform, Digital Inventory Services (DIS). WAG is...

Featured

Hypersonic Heats Up: CEO Joe Laurienti on the Success of Ursa Major’s 3D Printed Engine

“It’s only been about 24 hours now, so I’m still digesting it,” Joe Laurienti said. But even via Zoom, it was easy to notice that the CEO was satisfied. The...

Featured

3D Printing’s Next Generation of Leadership: A Conversation with Additive Minds’ Dr. Gregory Hayes

It’s easy to forget sometimes that social media isn’t reality. So, at the end of 2023, when a burst of doom and gloom started to spread across the Western world’s...