Over the past few years I've written several articles about 3D printing and its potential application in education. I first came across a 3D printer at a City Learning Centre in London. That was 15 years ago at the time of writing, ie 1998. What I had not realised back then was that 3D printing had already been around for ages -- since the mid-1980s in fact.

I learnt this fact from reading Fabricated. Subtitled "The new world of 3D printing", the book looks at scenarios, and the possible implications of 3D printing, in the not-too-distant future.

It's well-written, and with chapters like "Digital cuisine", "Ownership, safety and new legal frontiers" and "A factory in the classroom", the book holds much promise.

I put it like that because I haven't actually read it yet! I've literally just started on it, and thought I would take the opportunity to give you the heads-up on it.

One thing I don't like, and don't really understand, is that the Kindle version is only a couple of quid cheaper than the paper version. So, if you can bear to be a bit retro, and don't mind waiting a couple of days for its arrival, I'd suggest buying the physical version.

I think it would be interesting to speculate on what 3D printing might mean for education. Apart from the fact that as soon as it becomes viable enough for kids to bring their own mini-printer to school they will be banned from doing so.

Interestingly enough, when I was taking my teaching qualification, specialising in economics, we had a talk from a visiting speaker who said kids would be able to understand 3d models of costs and revenues more easily than the usual 2-dimensional representations. He even brought along a model he'd created earlier. Made out of wood, with great precision, it illustrated fixed vs variable costs.  However, I dismissed the idea at the time. That was not because I disagreed with the speaker, but because I couldn't see myself spending days and weeks making the wretched things -- especially given my complete lack of proficiency in carpentry.

But now, of course, or at least very soon, it will be possible to quickly and easily produce physical models of any concept you like, limited only by your imagination, to coin a phrase.

I wonder how the following concepts/ideas might be so represented:

• algorithms and computational thinking
• plot development in Hamlet
• the rise and fall of the Roman Empire
• the industrial revolution
• freedom of speech

I don't even know if some of these things could be represented as 3D models, but I think it is an interesting idea to explore. Personally, I think if you ask pupils to wrap their brains around this lot (or some of your own choice), they would come up with better ideas than we might. Not because I think kids are naturally digitally brilliant: I don't. (This isn't even a digital issue anyway.) But because for the most part they seem to have fewer preconceptions than we adults do.

Well, I am off to read some more of Fabricated. While I am doing that, you may wish to explore articles on the ICT in Education website about 3D printing, and a special edition of nour newsletter. Links given below. Enjoy!

Website articles on 3D printing

Newsletter articles on 3D printing 

    

Here is a competition which is aimed at secondary school students.  I quite like the idea of this: both the topic and the nature of what has to be submitted by entrants: a video of not more than 90 seconds answering the question:

In the future, how will technology help an ageing population?

Picture by Denise Krebs http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsdkrebs/This is an opportunity to get some really interesting discussions going. Perhaps you could get other colleagues involved, such the RE department.

There’s more about the competition on Bosch’s Facebook link, which is given below. It’s really confusing once you get there though: you can easily end up clicking on their photos instead of seeing the instructions – or maybe it’s just me. Anyway, the direct link is here: instructions.

The key thing to bear in mind right now is that the deadline for entry is 26th June 2013.

The full text of the press release is given below. Have fun with this!

Press release

Bosch has opened its annual Technology Horizons Award with this year’s challenge for secondary school children to develop a video explaining how technology will help an ageing population – with prizes for the winners totalling over £2,000.

In previous years, the award has received entries in the form of essays on engineering topics. This year, Bosch has decided not only to run the competition online using short video entries, but also to target the secondary school age group, with the Technology Horizons Award open for individuals and groups between 13 and 16 years old.

Peter Fouquet, President of Bosch in the UK said:  “Bosch is committed to developing technologies that improve the quality of people’s lives and an ageing population is not only a big issue for the UK, but many countries around the world.

“Our challenge to entrants of this year’s Bosch Technology Horizons Award is to think about how engineering and technologies, such as those pioneered by Bosch, will help to address such a major societal issue. We believe that inspiring young people to consider careers in engineering is vital to a sustainable future and for targeting the UK’s skills gap.”

Entrants are invited to respond to the question: ‘In the future, how will technology help an ageing population?’ and can upload their videos to YouTube and then onto the Bosch Technology Horizons Award app on the Bosch UK Facebook page.

There will be a prize for the most popular video by votes received on Facebook and the top 20 most popular entries will be submitted to Bosch’s judging panel, which will award prizes for 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place.

The winner of the individual category will win £300-worth of Amazon gift vouchers and the winners of the group category will each win £100-worth of Amazon gift vouchers. The teachers of the winners will each receive a Bosch IXO cordless screwdriver.

The closing date for entries is 26^th June 2013 and the winners will be announced on the Bosch UK facebook wall on 15^th July 2013.

For more information on the Bosch Technology Horizons Award, including a video guide on how to enter, visit https://www.facebook.com/BoschUK.

    

Whatever you think of the current debate over news that the US Government may have been monitoring the online activity of not only its own citizens but those of other countries too, you have to admit one thing. It provides a great opportunity for ICT teachers everywhere to bring some real-world issues into their lessons, in a very newsy (ie current) way.

Privacy keyboard by g4ll4is http://www.flickr.com/photos/g4ll4is/Here are a few suggestions for class activities you might wish to pick and choose from -- and add to.

• Find out: what are the plain facts. Or at least, as far as we know them. The thing is, we don't actually know all the facts, and that is a major part of the problem. So, perhaps a better question to research might be...
• What are the issues being discussed?
• How did the news/information become known?

Think about how the results of this research might be presented:

• A timeline depicting the events unfolding. Students could do this in a spreadsheet, in the form of a graph.
• Or how about a more visually appealing approach, using an application like Prezi, which has the merit of showing all the slides on the page (albeit in miniature)?
• You can bring some programming into this, using PowerPoint. In a low-level way, students can automate the presentation so that each slide appears after a set interval. At a slightly higher level, they could use hyperlinks. For example, the first or second slide could have a series of labesl, like "Prism", "Whistleblower" and so on. Clicking on each of them would take the viewer to another slide, a video, or a website where more information is presented. They could make their presentation even more sophisticated by using Visual Basic for Applications.
• They could create a website, and code it so that it's not just a static page or series of pages.
• They could summarise the events in a series of tweets.
• They could write a blog post about it.
• They could make a (one minute) video.

Think about how the issue(s) could be made easy for young pupils to understand. Why not have some older pupils create a video or simple animation (or even an interactive game) to explain the issues to younger pupils?

There is scope also for how the research findings are used, and some of this could bring in colleagues from other subjects. For example:

• Have some students make a video for a left-leaning organisation, while others make a video for a right-leaning organisation -- using the same basic information.
• We have known for a long time that GCHQ in the UK, and other Government agencies in other countries, monitor web and email traffic for keywords. How about getting students to write a simple computer program to simulate the process? You will probably need to provide them with a set of acceptable keywords, or some (especially boys!) will try out every swear word they know. Discuss: is the program useful? Why/why not?

Finally, there are the legal and ethical issues.

• If the USA is trawling through our data, where does that leave our assumed guarantees under EU Data Protection law?
• Does it matter anyway? Is there merit in the view that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about?
• How come this is news anyway? Boris Johnson has argued that ever since the web was invented you should have assumed that as soon as you do anything like send an email to someone, which goes to a server, or request information from a website (which resides on another server), anyone can read it. On the other hand, not everyone takes the same pragmatic view.

That last point raises another interesting issue: do your students know what happens when they send and email or do a Google search? There's another good lesson there too.

Any advances on these ideas?

    

When I last visited Cambridge, England, I thought the street signs were pretty good. Rather than display how far away things are, they tell you how long it will take to walk to them: far more useful.

An informative street sign, but maybe not as informative as it could be?

But a new idea, called Points, goes way beyond that. It can display all sorts of useful information, as you can see in the short video below, and read in the article about it (also below).

It strikes me that this would be a great topic to explore in class, with questions such as:

• What does it do?
• How does it do it?
• What are its advantages?
• What are its disadvantages?
• Is it just a gimmick or is it genuinely useful -- for example, do you really need  a street sign to tell you what’s trending on Twitter?
• How might it cope with several people wanting different information at the same time?
• Would it be cost-effective for a local council to set these up? Perhaps they would need to be sponsored by companies?
• Would they be vandal-proof?
• Could a similar idea be adapted for use in schools, hospitals, airports?

Lots to think about here I think.

Anyway, here’s the video.

And here’s the article: Points

    

Cloud Education ICT Design (CEID), which is run by the South-west Grid for Learning Trust, has published a very useful White Paper on Cloud Computing. At only four pages long it explains what cloud computing is, and what the benefits and risks are from an education establishment’s point of view. CEID intends to expand on the list of risks and benefits once it has analysed the survey results.

Clouds, by Karin Dalziel http://www.flickr.com/photos/nirak/

The purposes of the survey are:

“1. Building a large and accurate picture of the status of cloud ICT for education

2. Informing and influencing the cloud ICT market – this will include what we learn from the survey – and raising awareness of cloud ICT for education”

There are only 30 questions in the survey, and they are the sort of questions that either you will have considered already, or which you would certainly benefit from considering.

You can download the White Paper, which is in PDF format, and take the survey, from the CEID website.

My thanks to Joe Nutt for bringing this excellent resource and survey to the attention of Mirandanet members.