A wall of 3D printers was installed during October at in Room 114 as part of the Project Lead the Way class. Primarily students in advanced DDP will use the 3D printers, but any student can use them, depending on what they want to print.
The 3D printers were ordered last year and were delivered to the school over summer. Project Lead the Way “is an engineering course they onboarded this year,” said tech teacher Mr. Erlandson.
One of the main reasons the school got 3D printers is to be sure OP students are ready for future employment. “In order to set our students up for success and have them be ready for college, workforce, or whatever they are going into, they need access to the machines they are using in the industry,” said Mr.Erlandson.
The 3D printers were acquired on a grant. “The department came together to decide what we were buying [with the grant money], and we decided on the printers. We had to…get quotes from multiple different companies, and we had to justify the purchases… [We] got the printers over the summer. They were put in the basement and brought up and installed [in October]” said Mr. Erlandson.
The printers are not only benefitting the students in a way for them to learn how a 3D printer works, but it is also helping them in future careers and giving them more of an opportunity to be successful in what they do after high school.
Use of a 3D printer blends the knowledge of different computer programs and files and it is important for students to know how to use them to maximize their use. A 3D printer works by “Using a [Compouter Aided Design] (CAD) program, and once you have drawn and modeled in the CAD program, you export it as a STL file. Then take the STL file and open it is a prusa slicer, the port processing machine, and it takes the CAD file and makes it ready for the 3D printer. And in the 3D printer software, you can choose the settings you want, such as how fast you want it to print…what color you want your filament. We are non PLA, which is a corn based polymer, and once it is done on the prusa slicer and saves on an SD card, the card goes in the printer… Printer heats up, hit start on printer, and depending how big the file is determines how long it will print, which can take between 10 seconds and 400 hours,” explained Mr.Erlandson.
The Tech Department went through this whole process to get these printers for the students to better their education, to further their knowledge, and to increase their opportunities in their future careers.