Teacher Training Focuses on Enhancing 3D ThinkLink Curriculum

It’s back-to-school time and students aren’t the only ones doing the learning. Teachers from Maryland’s Freestate ChalleNGe Academy and the PHILLIPS School in Annandale, Virginia, are training in our 3D ThinkLink Creativity Lab this week.

Jim Field works with an M3D printer

They’re working with our Director of Instruction, Tom Meeks, to improve the 3D ThinkLink curriculum and learn to use some new 3D printing equipment and materials.

Freestate’s Rikiesha Metzger and Jim Field from PHILLIPS are providing valuable insights about how their students have responded to various elements of the curriculum.

Tom Meeks with Rikiesha Metzger

For example, they observed that hands-on activities are crucial for keeping students engaged in learning the basics of Moment of Inspiration 3D design software. Some kids become impatient and tune out when it takes too long to start printing things. As a result, we are reorganizing the lesson plans so that students will be able to print during their very first class session. 

  

In order to improve tracking of students’ progress, Tom and the teachers are adding “assessment projects” to the curriculum. Students will complete a project every week or so to show they’ve mastered key 3D design skills and to exercise the critical thinking and problem solving skills our program emphasizes.  

Rikiesha Metzger, Jim Field and Tom Meeks discuss assessment projects

During three years of teaching at-risk youth about 3D, we’ve learned that these students are especially eager to make things that are personalized, useful and have sentimental value for their family and friends. The assessment projects we’re developing reflect that.

We’re excited to have some new tools that make it possible to create items that can’t be produced with our Cube 2 printers, which use only hard plastic PLA or ABS filament.

The teachers are learning to use the Micro 3D printer, a small, versatile machine made by M3D. It can handle a wide variety of filaments including rubbery and translucent plastics and even materials that change color when exposed to certain temperatures.

These tools will open up all sorts of creative possibilities for our teachers and students as we begin a new 3D ThinkLink class cycle.

Student Snapshot: Adonis Gonzales

This is the first in an occasional series about outstanding young people who have completed our 3D ThinkLink class.

NASA had the Mercury 7 – the first class of American astronauts. YouthQuest has the Original 8 – our first 3D ThinkLink class.

One member of that groundbreaking group is Adonis Gonzales. We met him early in 2013 when he was a 17-year-old Cadet at Maryland’s Freestate ChallNGe Academy.   

He told us he always wanted to become a master electrician. But he had given up on high school, staying home “watching TV or sleeping” instead of going to class. Eventually, he said, the principal told Adonis he’d missed so many days that he couldn’t come back to school. After working a series of brief odd jobs, Adonis realized he needed more education in order to provide “a better future” for himself, his girlfriend and their baby daughter.

Adonis enrolled in Freestate, where instructors recognized his potential and selected him for our 3D ThinkLink pilot project.

“When I first went into the class, I saw the computers and printer and thought that it was going to be too hard,” he said in an interview with the Fairfax Connection. “But then the instructor said that if we could imagine something, then we could create it. The first thing I made was a heart with my daughter’s name on it.”

“Your mind can go farther than you think,” Adonis told us after his class took Vocational Orientation tours of a 3D Systems production facility and Prototype Productions, Inc., in Northern Virginia.

Adonis has been in an electrician apprenticeship program for more than two years and says he uses the problem solving skills he learned in our class to work through obstacles on the job.

“It helps me be creative with my mind and materials around me,” he said about his 3D ThinkLink experience.

Adonis also took our “failure is not final” message to heart. He didn’t pass his GED exam the first time he took it – or the second time. But he didn’t give up and he learned from his mistakes until, on the third try, Adonis earned his GED.

The Original 8 - Freestate ChalleNGe Academy, June 11, 2013