Year two, setting up the right path: 3D printing for low expense college courses

Abstract

3D printing is progressively impacting many areas of our society. While the general public is becoming increasingly aware of the possible applications of 3D printing and companies are looking to incorporate the technology, higher education's dissemination of this technology is not progressing at the same speed between various colleges within the same university. College students do have access to this new technology but at different rates, thus creating a barrier between students and their access to this trending technology. (Name Removed) will focus on the student population that may be challenged with low opportunity or no experience with 3D design and print. Having none or limited proficiency on building high technical skills could provoke challenges for research and internship opportunities. In addition, it could also slow the process of discovering groundbreaking research due to prioritizing and giving a huge amount of time in training and tutoring, instead of students already have developed and gained experience on those practical skills. The vision is to incorporate a set of guidelines that can be taken into consideration in order to ease the transition from an inexperienced student into a high-end proficient student that would not need huge time investment on teaching. In addition, an infrastructure model will be shown with capabilities to scale up/expand and adapt to each college needs without restructuring everything all over again.