An new piece of machinery recently added to the St Andrew's College and Diocesan School for Girls Design and Technology Centre might seem like something from a cartoon or a sci-fi movie.
An new piece of machinery recently added to the St Andrew's College and Diocesan School for Girls Design and Technology Centre might seem like something from a cartoon or a sci-fi movie.
It's a three-dimensional rapid prototyping machine, more commonly known as a 3D printer. The RapMan 3.1 is the first of its kind in Grahamstown and while Uitenhage car manufactures have very sophisticated industrial 3D printers, the Design and Technology Centre's one is the first to be used in a school.
Three pupils Leith Hobson, Bradley Rice and Jared Hone took it upon themselves to put the machine together and assembled it on site over approximately 24 hours. The necessary software was downloaded from the internet and then the fun could begin.
Pupils can now draw three-dimensional objects in any computer aided design programme and convert it into G-code for printing. They simply load their idea onto a memory stick and plug it into the interface board on the machine and presses print.
A strand of PVC plastic is fed into two extruders, which melt the plastic and print it in a very similar manner as a printer would use ink to copy a document from a computer. The machine then produces a model of the designed object.
The high quality of the product, relative to the time taken to make it, really speeds up the design process by allowing prototyping without pupils needing to manually build everything.
We are now on the cutting edge of design and technology because the speed at which we are able to realise designs has increased 100-fold, said design and technology teacher Stephen Ireland.
Ireland said he and other design teachers have noticed an increased interest in their subject from pupils and members of the public since the arrival of the RapMan 3.1.
