I didn’t realize how much I enjoy teaching until I started running Youth 3D.
When I founded this non-profit organization in 2021, I knew educating kids in 3D printing is important and will help our generation better prepared for the future world. Since elementary school, I have always enjoyed being a maker. From playing with Legos to building robots, I also wanted to share the joy of making stuff.
After giving 3D printing workshops, I have found teaching to become much more natural. The basic concept of 3D printing isn’t very complex but needs to be introduced in a way that is digestible for younger children. For the workshop, I usually start with a short, prepared presentation and printing demonstration. Since the ages of kids coming to the workshops vary from preschool to middle school, I try to adapt my language and topic complexity to my audience. After that, the Q&A session in the workshop is the most fun. I get the chance to have a dialogue with the audience, learn their thinking process and perspective, help them understand through conversation and further explanation, get the feedback of my teaching, and explore 3D printing together.
While I go into each workshop with the same gameplan, I try to be adaptive and improvise in order to be more engaging with the audience that shows up. At Conshohocken Free Library, we only had very young kids in the lower ends of elementary school. Because I knew a long-winded talk about the future of 3D printing would be boring to them, I decided to give them a hands-on experience, letting the kids each individually design something in TinkerCAD. By giving them something they could actually see and interact with, I was able to keep them engaged for an entire hour while talking about 3D printing, despite the usually short attention span of young children.
Over the past years my audiences have asked many interesting questions, which have made me think deeper about the technology and process of 3D printing. In addition to the kids, we also have had many parents coming to our workshops and community demos. At Shady Grove Elementary School’s Science Night, the Youth 3D stand received 200+ visits within 2 hours. At the event, we got to talk with many parents from different backgrounds and occupations. A lot of questions asked by parents were related to how I personally use 3D printing. With my robotics team also being in attendance as well, I mentioned them quite frequently as a major user of 3D printing. This also got me thinking about just how many parts of our robot every year is 3D printed and how much harder things would be if we had to precision manufacture those pieces from metal. It was eye opening for me and also got me thinking about just how much further 3D printing can go.
It has been really rewarding to see the smiles on my audience’s faces and receive the compliments from the hosting organizations. In the meantime, I realized that in order to be a good teacher, it is necessary to become a better learner. By teaching others, I have realized some gaps in my knowledge I was not aware of before. However, because of this, I feel I know 3D printing in and out.
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