Page 4 - TTWISpring2021

Manufacturing
page 4 | Manufacturing today Wi | spring 2021, Volume 1 electronic edition: www.manufacturingtodaywi.com

fab lab Curriculum at three lakes High school

schools. As a result, our students created projects to do on a small
are coming into high school with scale first on the XS Tech, and
much more Fab Lab experiences, then we were able to jump into
so we need to provide updated a big community project helping
opportunities and experiences out the Three Lakes Historical
that keep them moving ahead. Society. The Historical Society
One major change has been to has a couple of old logging sleds
take our How To Make (Almost) (used to haul logs back in the
Anything (HTMAA) class, which logging days) and asked us if we
was a junior/senior level class would be able to help design and
and integrating it into a freshman rebuild one of the sleds so that
offering called Engineering and it would be easier for people to
Design. This gives students more see how it worked. Our students
opportunities in the rest of their brought the sled back to the
high school career to take more of school, and we disassembled it
our advanced offerings. completely the sled so that the
Our newest offering is our students could make measure-
CNC class. We have added a more ments of each part in order to be
advanced, specialized class to our able to redesign them in Fusion
Fab Lab curriculum to allow the 360. We then took the 3D files
students to gain more, and deeper and put them into aspire to create
experiences in the world of Com- the toolpaths to cut all these new
puter Numerical Control (CNC). parts out of new material. The
We have taken the majority of the students were also responsible for figuring and cut faces, pockets and profiles, and were
Al Votis CNC content out of Engineering and Design, out what, and how much material we needed graded on meeting the given specifications for
Three Lakes School District and built a class around utilizing CNC to and creating a bid for the Historical Society to each cut. We then programmed and cut out 3d
This year, we have updated our Fab Lab control different machines, such as our CNC decide if the cost would fit into their budget. puzzle pieces to fit together. Each student cut a
different piece, and then the piece were assem-
curriculum at Three Lakes High School. We router, CNC plasma, Tormach xS Tech, and We are currently waiting to hear back from bled, or tried to be assembled depending on
went into the Fab Lab program knowing that our Tormach 1100 milling machine. them to see if we are approved to order the how close to tolerances they were able to get.
at some point, we would have to change how The CNC class is project driven. The materials and then create the parts and rebuild As the 4th quarter gets underway, we are
and what we do at the high school level. Over students have spent time learning more about the sled. learning more about using the cam portion
the last several years, we have worked to intro- the Vectric Aspire software to work on deeper We have also had our students work with of Fusion 360 for more complex designs and
duce concepts and technology down through understandings of how the program works community members to design and create parts, and then students will be designing and
the junior high and into the elementary for both cad and cam in 2.5 D. The students signs for them as well. This not only helps our
students learn more about CNC pro- machining individual projects.
gramming and machining, but also Overall, this class has given the students
to learn more about interacting with a glimpse into the world of machining and
the public. From there, we spent our manufacturing and given them some really
3rd quarter of the year learning more important skills for going into industry, or to
about metal milling on the Tormach start their own businesses! We are looking
1100. Students worked on learn- forward to continuing to upgrade our program
ing about vice set-up, and tooling, and keep giving students more opportunities
then we worked through conversa- and experiences!
tional programming. Conversational
programming is a part of Path Pilot
(Tormach’s operating software) that www.threelakessd.k12.wi.us
allows simple projects or features (715) 546-3496
to be programmed and machined
without using a separate cad/cam
software. Students programmed

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