Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Here We Go...3D Printing Comes To OHE!

  
Thanks to our OHE PTO, the best PTO ever, I returned to school this year to a huge box from MakerBot. In the rush of the beginning of the school year, I pushed the huge box aside with the intent of opening it once everything calmed down. This week, our OHE STEM teacher, Leah Yoemans, and I finally opened that huge box and out came a shiny new 3-D printer - the MakerBot Replicator+

Our goal for this printer is simple. We would like each of our 5th grade students to have the opportunity to create a simple design & print it. Easy right? Before beginning with students, we needed to learn how to use it ourselves!  Leah and I sat down with our district's resident expert, Mike Heitzig, to soak up as much as we could about how to connect, design and create with our new 3-D printer. We learned about Thingiverse and Tinkercad. We learned a few "dos and don'ts" and "how tos". I came out of our session with my head spinning, realizing how ambitious this really is, but also how valuable.

Stay tuned for more on our 3-D printing project and wish us luck!