Laser cutting in education

Draft

Introduction

One big advantage of laser cutting as opposed to 3D printing is that that the process is very fast and the result accurate. On the negative side, laser cutters are expensive and 2D cutting offers less possibilities than 3D additive manufacturing.

See also:

• Fab labs in education
• 3D printers in education

Laser cutting is taught in used in engineering schools but also sometimes in general education.

Laser cutting can be used for various purposes and we could distinguish three broad categories:

1. Teaching design and associated skill
2. Teaching some other subject area (e.g. maths or programming) through laser cutting
3. Teacher created learning materials with a laser cutter

More in details:

• Design teaching
• Soft skills e.g. project management
• As a pretext for teaching vector drawing
• As a pretext for teaching programming and mathematics
• As a means to create teaching tools, e.g. Montessori-type activities, simulation games,

Links

General

• Three Transformative Tools: From Old Tech to New (Part 2), Make Magazine, July 16, 2013

• The CIA uses board games to train officers—and I got to play them Also: why the CIA embraces training game cheaters, whether El Chapo hit a fire alarm. Sam Machkovech - 3/15/2017, 2:05 PM

Manual

• Free Laser Cutter ebooks from Obrary.

Models and examples

• Teachers' Resource: Simple Laser Cutter Projects

• Teaching Tools, Obrary, A nice collection of various objects.

Bibliography

See also Digital design and fabrication bibliography

• Buechley, L., Elumeze, N., & Eisenberg, M. (2006, June). Electronic/computational textiles and children's crafts. In Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Interaction design and children (pp. 49-56). ACM. (laser cutters are used to cut the outlines of augmented textiles)

• Blikstein, P. (2013). Digital Fabrication and ’Making’ in Education: The Democratization of Invention. In J. Walter-Herrmann & C. Büching (Eds.), FabLabs: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors. Bielefeld: Transcript Publishers.

• Clarkson, Graham. Laser cutting and 3D printing tools [online]. Journal of Australian Ceramics, The, Vol. 55, No. 3, Nov 2016: 40-43. Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=473070951500037;res=IELHSS> ISSN: 1449-275X. [cited 20 Jan 17].

• Eickhoff, D., Mueller, S., Baudisch, P. Destructive Games: Creating Value by Destroying Valuable Physical Objects. In Proceedings of CHI’16, pp. XX-XX http://stefaniemueller.org/destructive-games/

• Eisenberg, M. (2011, March). Educational fabrication, in and out of the classroom. In Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (pp. 884-891).

• Eisenberg, M., Eisenberg, A., Hendrix, S., Blauvelt, G., Butter, D., Garcia, J., ... & Nielsen, T. (2003, July). As we may print: new directions in output devices and computational crafts for children. In Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children (pp. 31-39). ACM.

• Sheridan, Kimberly; Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, Breanne Litts, Lisa Brahms, Lynette Jacobs-Priebe, and Trevor Owens (2014) Learning in the Making: A Comparative Case Study of Three Makerspaces. Harvard Educational Review: December 2014, Vol. 84, No. 4, pp. 505-531.