A Teacher's Guide to PrintLab Classroom 3D Printing Curriculum

PrintLab: 3D Printing Curriculum for Educators

Incorporating 3D printing into your curriculum if you are a K-12 teacher can be very daunting if you have no prior experience or someone in your building to support you. In that case, what do you do?

Aside from developing your PLN, it is beneficial to find curriculum options that are easy to follow for you, the educator, and for your students. The key consideration is to make sure that videos are available, lessons align to your standards, and authentic challenges are provided.

Fortunately, PrintLab provides training to help get educators comfortable with 3D printing and curriculum for them to utilize. Let’s take a look at how to use the site, some of the specific lessons, and my overall perspective from the viewpoint of a STEAM Facilitator, curriculum creator, and an instructional leader that supports teachers.

How to Use PrintLab: Teacher Perspective

To first sign up for PrintLab, schools can choose to subscribe annually for either an individual Teacher's License to the PrintLab 3D Printing Curriculum and Certification Course, which will grant access to the lesson plans and training rescources on the PrintLab portal to one teacher for 12 months, or the Site License for unlimited PrintLab Classroom accounts to all staff at your school, library or makerspace.

When you first go to browse the curriculum, you’ll receive a welcome message and the option to filter by theme, subject area, difficulty, or duration. 

On the right is an example of how a lesson is displayed, in this case "Pandemic Products". (This lesson plan is also offered completely free here on the MatterHackers website) Included in each lesson preview is an image that shows you what the students will be making, which applications can be used, and what the lesson is about.

If you start a lesson and return at a later time, the percentage indicator will show how much of the lesson you have completed. As of right now, tutorials to create 3D models are provided for Tinkercad, Fusion 360 or both. There are also a few lessons on 3D scanning and the usage of the free application, Meshmixer.

Let’s take a deeper look into the Assistive Device Academy lesson, Project Resources. We can see in the image below a detailed layout of the teacher resources. 

Once you click to open a lesson, the subheadings break everything down by category: introduction, preparation, guidance for a specific age range, and some suggestions on how to adapt the lesson for different learners. The last section, Feedback & Sharing, allows you to provide your feedback to PrintLab and share how that particular project went in more detail with the opportunity to partially extend your subscription for free.

How to Use PrintLab: Student Perspective

Using PrintLab from a student perspective is similar in many ways to the teacher view.

As of this writing, after the teacher provides the link, students access the program with a code and do not need to use an email address or a specific username and password combination to log in. You can see an example of the student sign in screen in the image on the right. This makes it easier for organizations to comply with privacy laws such as COPPA in the United States.

After using the code, you can see the layout of the lessons. A partial list of lessons is below.

If we click on one of the lessons, you can see the layout of the page, which is consistent across the tutorials with only minor variations. Below is a preview of the Assistive Device Academy lesson. The lesson offers informational resources in multiple formats, including videos, text, and images to help students prepare for the lesson.

If we click on one of the lessons, you can see the layout of the page, which is consistent across the tutorials with only minor variations.

Below is a preview of the Assistive Device Academy lesson we previewed earlier through the teacher’s side of the platform. In the student view, the lesson offers informational resources in multiple formats, including videos, text, and images to help students prepare for the lesson.

If we click on one of the lessons, you can see the layout of the page, which is consistent across the tutorials with only minor variations.

Below is a preview of the Assistive Device Academy lesson we previewed earlier through the teacher’s side of the platform. In the student view, the lesson offers informational resources in multiple formats, including videos, text, and images to help students prepare for the lesson.

The final segment, Design Process, takes students through the process of working through the project in clear and easy-to-follow steps. An example preview of a couple of early steps can be seen below.

Further down on the page of this particular lesson, you can see there is separation between Tinkercad and Fusion 360 tutorials. This is atypical in the sense that normally you don’t create numerous different designs for the same lesson, but it makes sense here because thematically they are similar in the purpose. 

Student Examples – Specific Lessons

In this section we will take a look at some of the process and final product of projects that I completed with students that incorporated some aspect of PrintLab lessons.

Lesson 1: Bottle Opener (Assistive Device Academy)

Various variations of the bottle opener were created by middle school students depending on their end user. Many prototypes were created using 3D pens, the Ultimaker 3 Extended, Dremel 3D45, and filaments such as PLA, Tough PLA, nylon, CPE, and PETG. Some examples can be seen in the subsequent images.

Skills gained/developed over the course of the lesson:

-          Research

-          Understanding of assistive technology

-          Human-centered design

-          3D modeling skills relevant to making a functional design

-          Basic math and physics concepts (forces, levers, simple machines, etc.)

-          How to plan, iterate, and refine prototypes

Lesson 2: Balloon Powered Car (Dragster)

In order to continue to challenge students, they were pushed to be as creative as possible with their car designs in Tinkercad. There wasn’t a Fusion 360 tutorial available at the time I initially did the project, so I showed students how they could use the Tinkercad to Fusion feature or make their design from scratch. Some students wanted to create their prototypes with the 3D pen, but most had more success making them functional with cardboard instead.

Skills gained/developed over the course of the lesson:

-          Research

-          3D modeling skills relevant to making a functional design with interconnected parts

-          Basic math and physics concepts (Newton’s Laws, resistance, friction, gravity, etc.)

-          How to plan, iterate, and refine prototypes

Lesson 3: Tactile Tangram

The tactile tangram lesson fit within a larger theme of an assistive technology and artificial intelligence project that I was covering with students. After testing it out, numerous alterations to the designs were made, but it was a great starting point for what we wanted to accomplish.

Skills gained/developed over the course of the lesson:

-          Research

-          Human-centered design

-          Designing for people with visual impairments

-          3D modeling skills relevant to making an accurate design with multiple parts

-          Basic math and geometry

-          How to plan, iterate, and refine prototypes

make:able

PrintLab recently started an annual competition which challenges students to create a solution for people in need. The focus for 2020-21 was to create a solution for people that have dexterity issues with their hands. I worked with students remotely to help them create a solution for a girl in their community that had difficulty tying her shoes. They created different iterations, but the final magnet based version worked the best.

Overall Perspective

As a whole, I believe PrintLab is a great resource for a wide variety of educators. If you are interested in 3D printing and design, there is something available for everyone regardless of whether you are a self-contained elementary school teacher, teach middle school social studies, or work as a high school CTE teacher.

As long as you have access to a basic 3D printer and some filament, no prior experience is required. If you are a seasoned educator who is already familiar with 3D printing, this can provide extension activities or challenges for you to build from, saving you from having to always develop everything from scratch if you are pressed for time.

Hopefully my brief overview and example student work has provided you some insight. In the case that you are interested in trying it out for your own class, contact education@matterhackers.com for a free 7-day trial.