3D Printing for Charity, Education

One of the benefits of the growing maturity of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry is that it can start to give back to the global community. Regular readers may remember us reporting on the use of 3D printing for the FIRST Robotics Competition (you can find the story here). That’s one example of how 3D printing can be used to promote education in a charitable manner. Today we’ll look at a couple more cases.

Stratasys recently announced the winners of its annual Extreme Redesign Contest. The contest encourages interest in AM by asking middle school, high school and college students from around the world to submit an improved design of an existing product or an original piece of art. Designs were submitted in CAD format, with the intent that they should be built using a 3D printer.

The winners in the college engineering category were Akshay Gautam and Gaurav Singh Jabalpur from the Indian Institute of Information Technology Design & Manufacturing with a redesign of a hand pump. The middle/high school engineering winner was Nicholas Pio from Warren High School in Downey, CA. Pio designed a fuel testing sump.

Winners received a $2,500 scholarship and runner-ups a $1,000 scholarship. Semi-finalists were given a 3D printed product using their design and a $500 gift certificate. Maybe more valuable than the prizes was engendering interest in students for the process of designing for AM.

A different sort of contest is being run by techfortrade, with support from MakerBot and Econolyst. The 3D4D Challenge is offering a $100,000 prize to anyone who can create practical designs using 3D printing, cell phone scanning tech and web design applications to help improve the lives of people in developing nations.

Given the poor infrastructure, relatively low tech levels and underdeveloped manufacturing industry in developing countries, techfortrade is looking for ideas that can be put to use via 3D printing to benefit whole communities. According to  the press release: “Potential ideas for entries could involve using 3D printed models and parts to improve agriculture practices, water supply or filtration processes, or energy supplies for rural or impoverished areas.”

 MakerBot is committed to increasing access to 3D printing technology and to supporting those who can benefit from it. Working with techfortrade on 3D4D is an exciting way to encourage innovation and create new ideas and applications for our technology to help improve the lives of people around the world. – Bre Pettis, founder of MakerBot

In an effort to nudge potential inventors along, techfortrade will be holding four free workshops around the world. Locations are:

• New York, MakerBot Industries – May 12, 2012
• Johannesburg, Hackerspace – May 22, 2012
• London, Westminster Hub – May 17, 2012
• Nairobi, Nairobi University FabLab– May 25, 2012

Sources: techfortrade, Stratasys