thomsen.

Being new to teaching 3-D Printing is quite the journey. With little experience, coming up with a new curriculum to teach 3-D Printing is a daunting task. To add more on top of that, teaching 3-D printing to kids with learning disabilities is even more daunting. When you teach at a private K-12 school, while the classroom ratio is extremely small, the task of individualizing a student class work is still challenging when you have several student who are outliers within the classroom. Here’s an example, you have a student who has low functioning skills, a student with high functioning skills, a student who is on the Autism Spectrum, how do you explain on every level what the “The Design Process” is before start making 3-D prototypes?

You realize that everyone has a different learning style. That’s the answer. You use visual. You have handouts. You write things on the board. You have it up as a powerpoint. You let them draw. You let them talk it out.

You also have to do your research. You have to look into a curriculum that’s not too advanced, but not too low for the advanced students. That’s where City X Project comes in.

City X Project is making teaching the first two weeks of 3-D Printing easy for me and for my students. The first day, we completely focused on “The Design Process” and incorporated fun workshops where they learned the tools to adapt, empathize, collaborate, and innovate. They saw videos that demonstrated how 3-D is applying to real-world challenges and how modern thinkers and inventors are helping citizens deal with real-world challenges.

The workshop has an engaging story that helps give the students content into 3-D.

City X Project has a great curriculum guide to help you guide through the process with ease. However, if you’re new to 3-D Printing, it is highly recommend that you read the guide afew times to know when you might have to go back to something if the students get confused or if you get confused yourself. Even myself, I missed some minor details, but after double checking, I was still able to answer all of my students questions.

What is also terrific about this curriculum is that it is also aligned with STEM, 3D Technology and Common Core Standards requirements. This is excellent since many school are adapting Common Core Standards into their curriculum and since they already have it, you don’t have to go through the entire Common Core Standards to find it.

City X Project has some great outside resources that you can use for 3-D Modeling such as mentioning Tinkercad, 123D Designs, Cubify.com and others! They also have a great FAQ section in their workshop guide and additional resources for you to add on your 3-D curriculum.

City X Project can be integrated into other subject(s) such as History, Language Arts, Science, and even Math!

If you have already used City X Project, I would love to hear back from you on what worked, what didn’t worked, and what you think City X Project could build on to make this curriculum even better :-)