MakerBot for Educators | Bring Ideas to the Surface

Check out Falcon Robotics – a high school robotics team using 3D printing to reinvent STEM learning with their autonomous …

MakerBot for Educators | Bring Ideas to the Surface/a>

My name is Fredi Lajvardi. I’m at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona. I’m the program director for the Center for Marine Science and I also run the Falcon Robotics team after school. Kids get excited when they hear "Oh! Robots!" and they want to get to use them. But before we just hand over any robot, they have to build it. You have to understand not only what’s going to be built, but what’s going to be inside the robot in order to run it, in order to control it. You actually get to apply the physics, you get to apply the math. You get to apply designing. My name is Alfredo Chavez, and this is HABOOB – our autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV for short. We have a bunch of 3D printed parts to hold thrusters, 3D printed parts to hold our battery. MakerBot has been extremely valuable in order for us to come up with components. How many of these parts can we make and actually put in our robot? This unit right here is the lattice. What’s really great about the lattice is that you’re able to change the design almost every year. Instead of creating a whole new robot and machining out new parts, all we’d have to do is just print a new lattice. The other thing that we have right here is our torpedo mechanism. The torpedo – we decided to use PLA, because we wanted to be able to print at different densities. We wanted a torpedo that when it was going through the water would stay neutrally buoyant. We figured out that we were able to get close to neutral buoyancy at about 89% infill. So that’s one thing that 3D printing allows us to do that you cannot do any other way that we can think of. Currently we have a MakerBot Replicator, we have a Z18, and we got the Replicator+. We’ll have a project that’s printing 5 days, and the rest of my classroom I have is Introduction to Marine Science class. So they come in and say "what are you guys printing?" So now they’re curious. It draws some people that might not even be interested in robotics to get into it, because they’re amazed. Being on the robotics team actually opened up the door for me to pursue what I want to do in my passions for college. Which is work with underwater robotics and see if there’s actually anything out there that we can use as a resource for the environment. It’s very important for the students to realize that the career they pick and the field that they pick should be something they want to enjoy for the rest of their lives. In order to be relevant, you gotta be creative, and be able to think critically and solve problems. So if you can do those two things, no matter what you do in your profession, then you’ll be successful.

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