Makerspaces!

Throughout my time in the School of Education at Indiana University, makerspaces have had a presence in many of my classes. From my English cluster to my Computer Educator’s License classes, my peers and I have learned about the benefits that makerspaces bring to schools. In these classes we have seen how this facility enhances student learning and engages them in ways that traditional teaching does not offer. When students have the opportunity to interact and create things with their peers, teachers have the ability to bring their students learning to the next level and provide them with a learning experience that they will look forward to having again.

Through my research of makerspaces and the resources that exist involving lesson plans, I have found a great interest in 3D printing. In one of my art classes at Indiana University I had the opportunity to design something that would later be 3D printed. The software that I used was extremely hard to use and not user friendly. However, in my W435 class I was shown the websites tinkercad and Thingiverse, which are both great resources for 3D printing. Both websites offer templates and pre created designs that users can print. They also offer different lesson plans that involve 3D printing that I found extremely helpful. I could also see myself using both of these resources in my future classroom, as they are both user friendly and simple enough for my students to use, although I would only allow students in the upper grades to use these tools on their own.

Through W435 I had the opportunity to use the 3D printer again to create a lesson to teach my future students. Since the time I printed was around Halloween, I decided to create a spooky lesson plan for my students. I decided to print a pumpkin for my students to use during their creative writing. The goal of my lesson was to have my second grade students look at the pumpkin and use descriptive words and details to describe what the pumpkin looked like. Students had the opportunity to just write a descriptive paragraph or they could write a poem about what they saw. I thought this would be a unique way to engage my students in a writing lesson and a different way for me to enhance my lesson.

The process that went into the actual 3D printing of the object was quite simple. Because the websites/tools that we used were so user friendly, all I had to do was pick an object/design that I wanted to print and save it to my computer. From here, we had the freedom to adjust the dimensions of the objects and chose color. Since our teacher was doing the printing for us, he printed all of our objects at the same time, and luckily for me he printed them all in orange. The only complicated aspect of the entire project was the actual printing of the objects. Our teacher showed us how to send them to the printer and explained to us that the printing could take all night.

When we all received our 3D printed objects, we were all laughing in disbelief at how poorly they turned out.  Many of the objects were so tiny that you could not figure out what they were. The printer created our designs in plastic but instead of being 3D they were in 2D failing to print any of the details. I think that we went wrong when we were choosing the size for the objects. I think that we made them so small that the machine had a hard time executing all the different details. In the future I think it would be best to create objects on a larger scale which would be easier for the machine and hopefully more successful.

Throughout the next few semesters I hope to gain more experience with the 3D printer to get a better understanding of how it works and how to create successful designs. I look forward to working more with this tool and many others in the makerspace.