Construct3D 2018

The true power of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies lies in their layer-wise approach to fabrication, which provides unsurpassed design freedom in both the geometric topology and the material composition of a product. However, this potential is limited in part by designers’ lack of knowledge on how exactly to fully exploit the process capabilities. A lack of knowledge of how to design products specifically for AM (DfAM) is often viewed as a barrier to industrial adoption of the technologies. In a 2014 NSF Workshop on “Additive Manufacturing Education,” participants from industry, government, and academia stressed the need for integrating design into an AM curriculum in order to educate students on how best to take advantage of the design freedoms offered by the technologies.
In addition to introducing formal curricula and AM design methodologies, there is potential in addressing this need by leveraging informal learning experiences; i.e., extracurricular activities such as internships, design competitions, and student engineering professional societies, which have been shown to positively contribute to students’ engineering education. In this talk, Williams will present two novel informal learning experiences to engage students in DfAM principles: (i) the DreamVendor, an AM “vending machine” system, that provides students open access to automated AM systems, and (ii) the AM Vehicle Design Challenge, an open extracurricular design competition that challenged students to design, 3D Print, and pilot air/ground vehicles.  In addition to describing these informal DfAM learning experiences, assessment results of their impact on student learning will also be presented.