RIPPL3D.com has announced a supplemental virtual challenge in the wake of the success of The Wind Turbine Challenge at the Smartforce Student Summit at IMTS 2014. Held every other year at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, the International Manufacturing Technology Show is the largest and longest running manufacturing technology trade show in the United States.
The Wind Turbine Challenge was presented by RIPPL3D.com and sponsored by the SME Education Foundation, which has provided more than $33 million since 1980 in grants, scholarships and awards through its partnerships with corporations, organizations, foundations and individual donors. Students were asked to use CAD modeling tools to create and test wind turbine solutions during the Challenge in the Make It! area of the Student Summit. Winners were awarded a $600 test stand to take home to their schools.
According to Pam Hurt of the SME Education Foundation, “The Wind Turbine Challenge at IMTS was a perfect example of the SME Education Foundation leading student engagement on the show floor. We provided hands-on activities that allowed students to design, print and test their wind blade, exposing them to manufacturing through 3D technologies.”
All schools that registered or attended the Smartforce Student Summit are eligible to participate in this new virtual challenge. Teachers are requested to organize their school’s designs and submissions; each school can submit up to five designs. Designs can be created and submitted here. This virtual challenge will run through until October 31. Completed builds will be tested and the results uploaded to the online leader board.
At the event, uPrint SE Plus 3D printers were provided by Stratasys for the Student Summit. Stratasys will also be supporting the virtual challenge by printing designs submitted through the virtual challenge online.
RIPPL3D.com is a web enabled gaming site that leverages 3D tools (freeware solid modeler & 3D Printers) that introduces users to the product development cycle of Design/Build/Test through various games and creative virtual environments. Users are also encouraged to iterate their attempts while applying what they learned from past attempts.
Excited from the success of the event, Bill Macy of RIPPL3D.com said: “We were excited to watch group after group gather around the test stations to naturally collaborate on a design strategy. Kids that didn’t even understand principles like rotational inertia, drag, and aerodynamic forces, left talking about how their designs were affected positively or negatively by these principles of physics. But the best part was finding the students that ‘engaged’ the exercise and watched the leaderboard to make sure that they made every attempt at reaching their best design. They will be our future designers!”
