Young 3D Printing Fans Beyond the Walls of BPC

Since this blog is mostly about our 11- (and 12- and 13-) year olds and our shared Printrbot and Makerbot, I thought it'd be nice to share some of the other featured young 3D enthusiasts from around the web.

Here is Andrew Man-Hudspith, 11 years old, recently featured on Engineering.com.

And this Ignite Phoenix talk from February 2011, entitled "Why I LOVE My 3D Printer,"(see Makerbot blog post) was given by Schuyler St. Leger, then 10- and now a 12-year-old maker who has since, among other things, kept his own Twitter handle (@ProfDocSky), taught a “Arduino 101″ session at the Desert Code Camp software developer conference in Arizona, and gave a keynote speech at Autodesk University Innovation 2012 Forum (!) entitled "Why I'm a Designer & a Maker."  Wow!

Are there any other young 3D printer enthusiasts we should know about?

Read More

We ♥ Ducks!

OK, I have a confession.  I bought an entire roll of yellow filament, just so I could print ducks.  Truly.  And it was worth it.  These used a design downloaded from Thingiverse, cleverly titled Duck.  It prints like a charm, with just a tiny bit of support material under its wings.

Of course, everything is cuter in a smaller size and multiples, so the kids were excited to try that. Everything we printing well, and I left to teach my tech classes.  When I came back... we clearly had a duck malfunction.

With just the surviving five, the kids were hooked.  Now they ALL want ducks.  The best part it that they are very powerful motivators in these last few weeks of school...

Read More

3D printed airway saves baby

Kaiba Gionfriddo was born with a condition called bronchial malacia, a condition in which the walls of the trachea collapse.  From the time he was 6 weeks until the time he was 3 months, he was in the hospital.  His mother says they had to do CPR on him EVERY DAY.

Kaiba's doctors contacted Dr. Glenn Green, who then got emergency permission from the Food and Drug Administration to do a special procedure which, before Kaiba, had only been tried on animals. Luckily for everyone involved, the surgery was a sucess!

"It's magical to me," said Dr. Glenn Green, an associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan who implanted the splint in Kaiba. "We're talking about taking dust and using it to build body parts."knew they had to come up with something, or the alternative would be a life on a ventilator.  

The doctors used a laser 3D printer to create a splint to hold open the baby's collapsing airway.  It was a few centimeters long and 8 millimeters wide and made of polycaprolactone or PCL.

When a splint is created using PCL, it becomes a sort of biological placeholder, propping up structures while the body heals around it.

Kaiba is now 20 months old and breathing on his own.  (see cute pic of him here)  Doctors say it will take the implant 3 years to degrade and then, presumably, the trachea will continue growing normally.

It's worth reading the whole article.  Or, you can read the published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Bioresorbable Airway Splint Created with a Three-Dimensional Printer"!

From Figure 1 in the publication...

Panel A shows the airway in expiration before placement of the splint; the image was reformatted with minimum-intensity projection. Panel B shows the patient-specific computed tomography–based design of the splint (red). Panel C shows an image-based three-dimensional printed cast of the patient's airway without the splint in place, and Panel D shows the cast with the splint in place.



UPDATED 6.26.13  This University of Michigan Health Systems article has more detail on this story - well worth a read.  It also includes this video: