Project Introduction
In STEAM education, students’ interest is one of the key things that teacher have to grab. For example, in an art class, it will be monotonous if the educator only asks students to form a sculpture since students will not be able to receive any reward to memorizing their hard work. With the help of 3D scanning and 3D printing, students now can make a sculpture, scan it to get a digital model and then transform it to a pen holder or other useful objects. In this way, students will be able to explore and test their skills in varieties of aspects including creativity, technical skill, and aesthetic ability.
Make the Sculpture
Students can use play dough or clay to form any character they like. It could be animals, cartoon characters or other objects that they are familiar with. For instance, one of the students made a sculpture based on a cartoon character with clay.
Scan Sculptures
After the sculpture was made, the next step is to digitalize the sculpture. An Einscan-SE 3D scanner was used to scan the sculpture and generate a digital model. This will allow us to edit the sculpture with 3D modeling software in order to smooth the surface and add more features that are hard to shape with hands.
Modify the Model
The generated digital model was then loaded into 3D modeling software for modification. In this case, the talented student uses 123D Design from Autodesk to transform the cartoon character into a pen holder by adding a base and carving a hole from the top.
Print the Object
Finally, the designed object model was sliced and printed by the Einstart-C desktop 3D printer. The printing process was easy and quick: just process the .stl model file with 3Dstar software then transfer the generated model file with a USB drive to the printer and hit start print. The printing speed of Einstart-C is faster than other similar printers. The whole model is 123mm high and only took about 7 hours to print which is almost half of what it took for the former model.
With the printer, students can take back a meaningful reward home quick and easy. With the printer, the STEAM class can offer both depths of knowledge and joys of design.
