MakerBot Innovation Center
We are one of only about fourteen MakerBot Innovation Centers across the
country. The first and only one currently in Georgia. And we've printed over 500
prints and are really starting to gear up now, working with all different
disciplines across campus as well as members of the community.
From a foot away you can't even tell that this is 3D-printed. And you can see
the level of detail not just in the skull but also in the dentition and the
different muscle attachment areas of the skull. So the students were really able
to look at this and examine and see specific adaptations that different
primate groups had skeletally and compare those to one another to really
start to understand primates and how they've evolved. The immediacy that it
provides, the cost benefits it provides, and then also the accuracy and the
realism; I mean I really see it as a win-win situation. I feel so lucky to
have had this. It provides a lot of opportunities to print things beyond
what you might initially think about printing and again the students really
love seeing these different sorts of things. And who doesn't want to compare
their hand to a chimpanzee
So students are continually
with their variety of invention. We've printed all kinds of objects, from toys
essentially to assistive devices to help paralyzed children. We've really run the
gamut from models and molecules to primate skulls.