Mendelmax 2.0 in the classroom!

Our school district PR guy came to my class last week to take pics... Heres the scoop.  He took several great pics, most of which I've posted here but you can see the entire album on the Districts Facebook page here:  District 55 Tech Class


Without further ado, here they are.

Students finishing up their Sketchup projects. Yes, we have ancient computers.  When I started teaching here almost 4 years ago, I only had TWO, so I'm not going to complain!









The printer... Y'all have seen it before it here it is in it's "home".  Had to slightly modify the desk so it would fit.



The heli's final resting place.



Edumication. Walked them through the process of exporting the file from Sketchup as an .stl, repairing it in Netfabb, and finally loading and positioning in Repetier.



Explained to them how Slic3r worked and showed them a few of the basic settings, then we sliced. They were pretty impressed that we generated 18,000 lines of code for one simple car. It was fun to make them think math for a bit- vectors / coordinates on an X/Y grid, and explain to them a few different g-codes and how the computer interpreted them the same way they do in their math classes.



Business end of the printer all set up and ready to go.



One of my most useful tools- a webcam, duct taped to a light arm. I can point it anywhere (including my monitor) so they can see what I'm doing up close on the screen without having to crowd around me.



What they see on the screen:



Annndd..... PRINT!







Not real great quality because I had the speeds cranked way up so they could see it finished during class.  This print only took about 12 minutes-  10% infill.



Explain some of the capabilities- manufacturing custom parts for Hotwheels.



Yeah, this pic... "BEHAVE, or I shall turn you into this vile blue goo!"


Got a bunch more done- up to 26. Have just a few to finish up and then we start printing wheels.




Print quality is much better on these but still getting some defects.  Think its a combination of things, mainly the fact that the desk the printer is on tends to shake as the printer runs.  Plan on doing some experiments there in the future.



The students love watching the printer run... We had a test on sketchup / printers on Friday, which I haven't had a chance to look through yet but one of the questions was about what they thought the future would bring to the 3D printing scene. Kind of excited to see what they think!

I'm still impressed with the Mendelmax 2.0.  I ran it over 8 hours straight one day and about 6 the next with no issues whatsoever.  It's been a long process getting bugs worked out and everything working, and I have a ways to go still as I learn more and attempt new things, but the printer has been more than up to the challenge.

Makers Tool Works, job well done!  

Ruminations on really good teachers.

Had a guy contact me through the interwebs about teaching.  From time to time I get questions like "How on earth do you manage to do what you do without killing anyone", or "What on earth possesed you to be a TEACHER?!", and probably the most common, just the plain old "WHY?!".  Good questions, which I really don't have a great answer to, other than I love doing what I do. 

Being a teacher is incredibly demanding. Not necessarily physically- although I vividly remember my first year teaching and being physically more tired after a day teaching than I was after spending a 12 hr day building a brick retaining wall by hand in near 100 degree temps.  Teaching demands near 100% attention 100% of the time.  Teaching demands that you are ready, willing, and able to do what is asked of you not just by the students, but by their parents, your administrators, the community, the state, and the federal government. 

I still consider myself a total and utter noob at the teaching game, but I feel like I'm starting to figure some things out.  I work with an incredible group of people, all of them having great things to share / show / teach me about being a better teacher.  Over the last couple of years I have been starting to notice things that I feel make a person a "good" teacher.  I'm not going to try and define exactly what that means.  I'm not going to try and classify teachers into 27 different categories- I'll leave that up to the state and their "merit pay" scale. 

Lately, I've been jotting these things down and have made a bit of a list of what I feel makes a person a good teacher.  This list is by no means finished or should it be considered exactly what you should do to be the perfect teacher.  That's part of teaching- the only constant is that things change.  Without further ado, here's my list.



A good teacher:

Is prepared.
Knows and ENJOYS their subject.
Understands and can relate to their students and can teach on their level.
Is willing and able to better themselves.
Can work well with others,considering all side of a situation.
Always looking for ways to make things better, IF needed.
Lives by the KISS philosophy (Keep It Simple, Silly).
Is excited about what they do.
Is happy.
Can smile.
Will change things when its obviously not working.
Is flexible in day to day plans.
Is someone people in the community can look up to.
Is organized.
Is positive.
Is patient.



So there you have it.  A lot of those items may not seem to make much sense, and I could go into a lot of detail on each one of them.  For example, the smile thing-  I've heard from various different places that a teacher shouldn't smile at students until after Christmas or some such thing.  If you can't smile at your students, it might be time to rethink things a bit.  Some of those things may not seem to have anything to do with teaching, but students can tell if you are happy or not, or if you like what you are doing, and it affects how they percieve your class.  Do I claim to be able to do all of these things?  Absolutely not. 

That's my 2 cents on the subject, so take it for what its worth.  Thanks to all of my colleagues and friends both at home, school, and around the world for their great examples and words of wisdom as they continue to hopefully help me become a "good" teacher.