Well its been a wonderful sunshine filled couple of weeks, I’ve been diving more into learning how the Maker Movement works and have thought up some fantastic new blog posts on the subject! So watch out!  I’m coming back with some insight on a fantastic new gadget I’ve acquired called the 3D Doodler which is a 3D Printing Pen!

So what is this 3D Printing pen? Many of you have probably seen so many stories out there on the new 3D printing craze :

It has become a resource and tool in the Maker Movement that is taking education by storm. Students are gaining the skills to be able to design and manufacture 3D products that they otherwise would only realize on paper sometimes never see come to life.  

The printer takes plastic and melts it just enough to become pliable to mold into whatever the user has dreamed up. The plastic then hardens within seconds to become a 3D object. With the printing pen it has the same sort of idea but you can relate the pen more to that of a hot glue gun, only the pen does not melt the plastic to the point of liquid like the glue and with the pen you can free hand what ever you want!

My Sister trying it out!

Now imagine this in the classroom. There are so many possibilities for making, I see just in the regular classroom students making 3 D shapes to study in math, learning about engineering and building their own buildings, even building their own simple machines to study in science!  What else can you see using this for in your classroom?

Some of my creations!

Going even further into  the music classroom I wondered long and hard  about how to incorporate it. What about  3D sound waves for studying pitch and science of sound? Or how about building your own chord machine to help students identify chords? Maybe even printing your own instruments for studying about different instrument families?

How COOL would it be to discuss the string family and then build a model of a violin right in front of your students eyes? ?

Another tool to add to my list of Maker Movement resources to explore even further!  Do you have access to 3D printing? How would you use this in your classroom?

  Want to learn more about the Maker Movement from educators like yourself? Check out #ITLChat on Twitter to connect with some amazing teacher leaders!