Tag: Exploris

As in years past, we teamed up with one of the 4th grade teachers at Exploris Elementary School to help with their engineering design unit. We decided to kick off the partnership this year by showing the students some of the different tools that we use in the lab and how we use 3D printing in our research. We tried this once before but had it scheduled for mid-march of 2020, and we all know what happened then… We were glad that they finally made it out to visit the lab and we could show off some of our fun toys!

First we introduced ourselves and talked for a few minutes about what it means to be a biomedical engineering and how we use 3D printing. The fun spinning chairs in the classroom were definitely one of the highlights of the visit.

Then we went back to the lab and had four stations to rotate the kids through.

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Ricky  showed them how we can use a 3D scanner to digitize objects, such as Mario.

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Zack and Margaret showed off one of our 3D printers

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Steph and Melika challenged them to think in 3D using WikiStix and a 3D pen.

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Matt showed them how we can use the Instron to test material properties of different types of tissue. This one is always a favorite because we get to break things!

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Mario was kind enough to model some glasses made with the 3D pen

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We’re all excited to be able to partner with Exploris once again and look forward to our future visits.

We kicked off our engineering design unit with the 4th graders at Exploris Elementary last week. This is our fourth year working with them, and we’re very excited to be back in person! Our six “engineering challenges” were culled from the ones we’ve used in previous years, so you could almost think of it as a “best of” list.

We look forward to seeing the creative ideas that the students come up with!

This year looked a bit different than previous years, but we were so glad to still get to pair up with the amazing 4th graders at Exploris Elementary for their engineering design unit. They had five “big picture” problems that they had to create solutions for and then create a design using Tinkercad. Everyone’s designs were so creative and innovative and we can’t wait to do it again in 2022. 

the kids had tons of questions about biomedical engineering that we answered (as best we could)

the winner got a 3D printed baby Yoda as a trophy

Last year we worked with Annah and Robert’s fourth grade students at Exploris Elementary in downtown Raleigh (read about that here). We had a great time and learned a ton from the students, so when Annah reached out again we jumped at the chance! We once again focused on 3D printing and design, with the students doing an engineering design project designed to address one of five “grand challenges”. We visited their classroom and told them about 3D printing, what it can do, and how we use it in the lab. We also helped them brainstorm some ideas for their challenge and gave them feedback on their prototypes. Today, we got to see the results of their efforts during final pitch presentations. What an amazing group of students and truly inspirational teachers!

See Steph’s tweet about our initial visit here.

And Annah’s tweet about the pitch presentations here.

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The students welcomed us with artwork:

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The winners with their 3D printed trophies:

Late last year, we were contacted by a local teacher, Annah Riedel, at Exploris Elementary School. She met us at SciREN and wanted to pair up to teach her fourth graders a bit about 3D printing and introduce them to the Engineering Design Process. First, they came to us out at the vet school and we showed them three different approaches to 3D printing. Then, they were each given a challenge to be solved by designing something and drafting a prototype to 3D print in TinkerCad. We met with them a few times to give design feedback, then picked a winner from each group to actually print.

 

Everyone had a great time (at least we hope) and everyone learned a lot, especially us! Thanks so much Annah for reaching out. You can read her blog post about it here.