All tagged STEM Education
Recently I made a unique tool for showing science, technology, engineering, math, and manufacturing to students. It is a mechanical clock that has over two dozen 3D printed parts in it. In the presentation, students are truly engaged in learning more about the clock.
During my time operating the Machining Blog business, I have visited a few schools. I noticed one thing that was the same about their programs, and that was their 3D printers were just used to produce trinkets and not mechanical parts. I decided to create a project that could create many learning opportunities from it, and that project was to design and build a mechanical clock. The clock that I designed was based on a mechanical watch design, but I scaled the part size up by six times their actual size. I started the project by reading books on watch design and by taking apart watch movements. I learned along the way and then started designing watch movement parts in Solidworks CAD software. I then purchased a small 3D printer and started printing the parts. Once the gears started to mesh properly, I built a few prototypes along the way. With all my time that I invested in the project, it probably amounted to a couple thousand hours. The result was a clock that is pretty accurate for being printed, not machined.
The egg drop challenge is a great STEM activity. There are many ways to build a device that may win in an egg drop challenge. We will cover a very basic way to possibly win. This solution was tested at a 15-foot drop without failure. There are three items needed for this experiment, a large plastic container with a lid, a roll of toilet paper, and a large egg.