XYZ Printing and FabLab San Diego are partnering up to present free monthly 3D printing workshops, among the first to offer a 1:1 student to printer classroom environment. They have the potential to not only spread awareness of 3D printing in general, but also to educate the consumer market on the printing process and 3D printing applications.
The partnership will kick off at FABlab San Diego, a digital fabrication workshop in San Diego within the larger national network of MIT-operated labs across the world. The free workshops will be led by FabLab instructors, and will allow the general public to have hands-on experience with 3D printers. Each person will leave the workshop with their own 3D printed part and a lot more knowledge about digital fabrication and 3D printing.
The 1:1 student-to-printer ratio will be made possible via XYZprinting’s low-cost machines. XYZprinting is the 3D printing division of New Kinpo Group, a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturing group. Their products include the popular da Vinci and the da Vinci Jr., one of the more affordable 3D printers on the market. The company will also be releasing the Nobel 1.0 UV laser 3D printer this Spring. The new initiative with FabLab San Diego reflects the thoughts of New Kinpo CEO Simon Shen, who said at CES this year, “We want to get everyone involved in the third industrial revolution of additive manufacturing.”
These free monthly classes are a great idea to replicate in my opinion. There’s no reason why people who are curious about the technology can’t have a free class at their local FabLab and begin to experiment with it. And more organizations, hobby clubs, businesses, and schools are opening up to the open source ethos in the physical world. It seems probably to me that, as more minds collectively focus on this emerging technology, more innovations will follow that will push the industry in new directions.