3D printing
At the end of August, Beertje started talking about 3D printing. He wanted to get a 3D print and enthousiastically talked about lots of youtube movies he'd seen about it and about children running an online shop. He just went on and on and we want to stimulate his interest in technology. Yet we're not going to sponsor and invest in hypes and short-term interests.
So I ordered his older brother to take him at the end of the summer vacation to SHIFT. That's an organisation that organises technology sessions, workshops in a low threshold-walk-in style in the city center of Leuven for teenagers. Kabouter had already spent some time at SHIFT in the previous years and had explored VR and 3D printing or just gaming with some of his friends.
While Beertje was officially too young to go to SHIFT, we sort of pushed both boys to go and ensure that Beertje got an opportunity to test a printer and get a realistic image of what it is about.
He returned even more enthousiastic. With the coaches he had designed something in a program which is a sort of autocad and then he had printed it. It wasn't done when they left so Kabouter had to take him back to SHIFT the first week of school to go and pick up his first print. It was a self-designed chair to hold a mobile phone but it needed improvement next time with a little hole that would allow the cable through etc. We were impressed.
And so Jan went surfing and found an offer on a 2nd hand printer.
And all of September , Beertje has been surfing for designs and has been printing cool stuff, handing out presents to friends etc.
The connection to a design program is not optimal yet so to our disappointment he's mostly been searching for designs and downloading them, which of course isn't a big achievement yet. But he sure didn't lose his interest yet. And we're often quite amused about what gets out of the printer...except for Rodin I guess.
So I ordered his older brother to take him at the end of the summer vacation to SHIFT. That's an organisation that organises technology sessions, workshops in a low threshold-walk-in style in the city center of Leuven for teenagers. Kabouter had already spent some time at SHIFT in the previous years and had explored VR and 3D printing or just gaming with some of his friends.
While Beertje was officially too young to go to SHIFT, we sort of pushed both boys to go and ensure that Beertje got an opportunity to test a printer and get a realistic image of what it is about.
He returned even more enthousiastic. With the coaches he had designed something in a program which is a sort of autocad and then he had printed it. It wasn't done when they left so Kabouter had to take him back to SHIFT the first week of school to go and pick up his first print. It was a self-designed chair to hold a mobile phone but it needed improvement next time with a little hole that would allow the cable through etc. We were impressed.
And so Jan went surfing and found an offer on a 2nd hand printer.
And all of September , Beertje has been surfing for designs and has been printing cool stuff, handing out presents to friends etc.
The connection to a design program is not optimal yet so to our disappointment he's mostly been searching for designs and downloading them, which of course isn't a big achievement yet. But he sure didn't lose his interest yet. And we're often quite amused about what gets out of the printer...except for Rodin I guess.
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