Conrad Ma is part of the TTED program at BCIT and has been using MediaWorks to print the custom parts required for his robotics project. We wanted to share the finished version as it is an exciting example of how students can use 3D printing and integrate it with other technology…Well done Conrad!

“This project is for a class called Teaching and Learning Support Materials in the TTED program.

It is where we get to build teaching materials that we could take to our school shops when we become teachers. Technology Education teachers are traditionally known as shop teachers. We are teachers who teach elective courses in a wide variety of shop classes including woodworking, metalworking, electronics and automotive technology.

With this project I wanted to make an eye catching project that can help teach different processes from several shops. For this project I welded the pipe to the steel base plate, I went to the wood shop to laminate the palm section of the hand, I 3D modelled the fingers in Fusion360, and of course, I programmed the Arduino microcontrollers in electronics. In addition, this project can also be a selling point to attract students into my shop class by showing the different types of things that they can learn to build and work with. In essence, this was a passion project of mine as I really wanted to learn the robotics behind a project like this and I hope I can use this to spark an interest in my students to build something that they want to build.

Inspiration for this project came from my own experience in electronics class in high school. I named this “Project Gebert” because my electronics teacher had a student that made one of these robotic arms. Unfortunately my teacher had an unfortunate accident where he was reaching for an old container of etchant on a high shelf and the container broke and etchant spilt into his eyes. That made him unable teach electronics after my grade 10 year. I always wondered what it would be like to learn Robotics from him in my senior years. Now that I have learned enough robotics to build a project like this, I dedicated this project to my late electronics teacher Ross Gebert.

Thank you very much MediaWorks for helping me build this project. It was a joy to build and see come together. Here are some photographs of the finished product and of the 3D prints that you helped me with:”

https://www.bcit.ca/library/mediaworks/