Get Started (or Get More Sophisticated!) with 3D Printing this Summer

You might be seeing all these amazing opportunities go that use a 3D printer. But you might be saying to yourself, "I have no idea how to get started!"

We like to say that 3D printing is about as complicated as cooking. Printers exist at price points from about $200 to millions of dollars, and, like a kitchen, what you need to buy and need to know will vary with what you are trying to accomplish.

But what can you accomplish? Perhaps you can take a bit of time this summer to find out. Rich Cameron and I have our long-running "Intro to 3D Printing" course through LERN Network, a four-week online course starting Monday (and again in September). There's still time to join up for this one. Details are at this link. This is a community-college-extension level course. At the link you can explore LERN's requirements for CEUs, if that is important to you.

If you are in Southern California and would like to learn with us in person, in July we have two courses at STEMWorld in Pasadena. We have both a beginner (July 16) and a more-advanced (July 18) session. Please sign up since space is limited!

If you're in manufacturing and want to know what's possible, you might particularly be interested in our course Additive Manufacturing: Short Run Production.

We also have courses on the nuts and bolts of 3D printing and on the vast array of materials currently available. You can see the current list here.

If you'd prefer to work on your own, we have seven books out now. For our teacher friends, we have two books of 3D printable science projects. The cover photo is a set of wings from our "3D Printed Science Projects" - we were able to make a whole set of different types of World War II era wings to let students see how angle of attack and wing characteristics affected lift. (The wings are placed on a postal scale and, when a fan is turned on, they "weigh less" because of the lift.) It's a great way to introduce aerodynamics at a variety of different levels of sophistication.

We hope to meet some of you this summer and help you start or move farther along your 3D printing adventures!

#3dprinting #manufacturing #education