ONTARIO, Ohio–Students at Ontario High School have the opportunity to bring their designs to life thanks to innovative 3D printing technology.
Within about three and a half months, senior Nick Rupp created a mechanical hand using a 3D printer. While displaying the hand’s functionality, he said he’d like to tweak it some by eventually adding knuckles and making the thumb more opposable so it can grab items.
“Essentially it’s the start of what could be very profitable in the future,” he said.
Rupp was one of four students, including Nic Arnett, Noah Day, Daniel Hufford and Madi Rehfeldt, who explained their projects during the board of education meeting Tuesday evening. The students are part of Bruce Weirich’s classes, which include Rhino, a 3D computer graphics and computer-aided design course, and a class on robotics.
Rehfeldt never imagined she would take a class like Rhino, but now that she has, she’s hooked. “Since I’ve gotten into it, I love it,” she said.
She enjoys having Weirich as a teacher, noting, “I look up to him. I think all of the students do.”
Board President Sam VanCura commented, “[Weirich] might be the best instructor of Rhino in the United States…so we are really, really lucky to have Bruce as one of our teachers.”
Weirich talked about the growing popularity of 3D printing, saying, “Just like everyone has a microwave, everyone is going to have one of these [3D printers].” He added, “The quality of print on a 3D printer is unbelievable.”
Ontario Schools obtained its first 3D printer about seven or eight years ago, which Weirich built by hand.
Since then, students have been able to watch their designs come to life. After coming up with an idea, they sketch it out, develop it in Rhino, animate it, and then print it.
While holding one of his creations, Day commented, “I really wanted to design the 2013 Chevy Volt, my brother’s car that he has just gotten, and he moved out to London so I don’t get to see him much, so this is really reminiscent of my brother.”
He said he first modeled it in Rhino, which took about a month. “Rhino is a lot of trial and error processes,” he said. In total, he’s been working on the project for the past three months.
Some students are in the process of developing a chocolate 3D printer which will be able to print candy. Weirich said they’ve hit a couple rough patches in the process, but they’re looking forward to future progress.
One of the newest classes Weirich is teaching is the robotics course.
Hufford, who is currently taking the robotics class, noted, “We are only scratching the surface of what these robots can do…We didn’t even get them out of development, or at least the company didn’t, until about halfway into our class. Until then, we were just studying the basic things that we could do with robots.”
“There’s all kinds of things that these robots can do,” he continued. As he was talking, Arnett demonstrated one of the robot’s capabilities by programming it do a push-up.
“They can do handstands, push-ups, dances–we can design them to basically do anything a human can do,” Hufford said.
He said they have designed a program that causes the robots to bring them beverages and food. “And I know you might think that we’re a bit lazy for that, but hate me if you want to. I get drinks. You don’t,” he said.
His face beamed with excitement as he discussed the class. He noted, “I am taking robotics again my senior year (next year) because I am so excited to see where this program goes. Because just over the course of four and a half weeks, we were able to get these things to do so many incredible things and I thought that was just awesome.”
