Dialog reporter
WILMINGTON — Tucked into a small classroom adjacent to the library, St. Mark’s High School has taken a big step into the future, one it hopes will engage its students in a more active way and prepare them for what they will encounter in college.
The school has added three 3D printers to its creative technologies lab, and students in Mike Holland’s engineering and robotics classes have been busy designing bridges and sending them to the printers, which are spitting out small versions of the items. The 44 students who take the class – there are two sections – have been wowed by additions.
“I thought it was really cool,” senior Eric Sawka said. “I had never seen a 3D printer before. I knew how they worked and I knew about the technology, but I’d never seen one. They’re really cool to watch work.”
Sawka’s classmate, Chase Newman, had seen 3D printers on his college visits, but they were not being used. He had much the same reaction as Sawka.
“It’s pretty cool to see it in action. It builds it laterally all the way up. I don’t know, it just looks really cool,” he said.
As Sawka explained, the printers house big spools of plastic that is melted down and passed through a nozzle on to a base. The nozzle moves laterally back and forth, building whatever it is told to build – in this case bridges – “one layer at a time,” he said.
Holland said the class focuses on three areas: an overview of engineering principles; robotics; and bridge design. The creative technologies lab is new to St. Mark’s this year, allowing the school to expand on the introduction to engineering it offered previously.
“What we’ve done is take the class and added technology to it,” Holland said.
It’s not just engineering students who are using the lab. Other students and faculty employ the Macs and printers for classes in Java, digital photography and app development, among others, said Linda Fischer, the school’s director of information resources. These computers contain a lot of high-end software not available on other computers at the school.
“We have a lot of different things going on in this room,” she said. “The whole idea is creativity.”
Multiple funding sources made the lab possible, St. Mark’s spokeswoman Charisse McGill said. The diocese was one of them.
Holland said he had been hoping to introduce these tools to his students for a while. The lab opened in the middle of this school year. He got some assistance on the 3D printers at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where, he said, he saw just about every type of 3D printer there is.
“They were very helpful to us because they had experience with all kinds,” he said.
His engineering classes include very little talking on his part, and a lot of trial and error on that of his students. “Two months ago, these kids didn’t know what AutoCAD was,” Holland said, referring to the engineering software they have been using to design bridges. Now, he added, they probably could design just about anything.
Sawka’s bridge combines a truss with arches, and it took a couple of tweaks to get it to work on the printers. The engineering class without the printers is great for visualizing, but to make something and hold it in your hand is really cool, especially when it’s something where you didn’t have to glue tiny pieces together.”
He probably won’t be designing bridges as a chemcial engineering student next year at the University of Delaware, but Sawka knows there are 3D printers in his future. His classmate Newman, who will major in engineering at Millersville University, also thinks this technology will give St. Mark’s an edge when it comes to drawing interest from middle-school students.
“I think it’s a big step up,” Newman said. “This is generally what I want to do with my life, and this would be something that would attract me. I’ve always been one of those kids to do hands-on stuff, any kind of elective where you can get out of the desk and do something.”
