By Nick Carne
Maths and science are much more fun when you do stuff, not just read stuff. That’s the rationale behind an innovative teaching and learning program developed in Adelaide that’s already being used in schools in Australia, the US, Hong Kong and South Korea. Inspired by advances in 3D printing, the team at Makers Empire developed software that allows students to create 3D characters on an iPad or tablet then make them a reality. And the potential was obvious from the very first trial.
“Just seeing the students take to it like nothing else and to watch the excitement as their creations were physically made with a 3D printer was great – there were light bulbs coming on all around the classroom,” said the company’s co-founder Roland Peddie. “It was then just a matter from that point onwards of how do we make this more streamlined and more useful in the classroom setting. It was obvious that the core experience was fun and very educational for the students, and was a lot of value for the teachers as well.”
Further development led to a program in which students can design in three dimensions in either freehand or with geometric shapes. A compatible file is then exported to a 3D printer and the student can physically handle their creation. The design software can be applied in any aspect of teaching – from creating leaves and plants in a biology class to reproducing the pyramids of Egypt in a history or architecture class or formulating a string of molecules in a chemistry class.
The real game changer came when Peddie and his team drew on the knowledge of experienced teachers here and overseas to develop “lesson plans” to accompany each module. A biology lesson plan, for example, involves students researching information about spiders, writing a report, creating and printing a spider in 3D, and then writing a story about spiders – which might be incorporated in an online publication using the 3D representation that the student has created.
As Peddie’s co-founder Anthony Chhoy explains, students are implicitly picking up a range of skills across a number of disciplines as they work with Makers Empire. “We are taking a completely different approach to what other software and hardware companies are doing, for us it’s more about the learning outcome,” he said.
Makers Empire was joint SA winner of the Start Up Company of the Year in the Australian Information Industry Association’s 2015 iAwards and brought home a Bronze Medal from the prestigious IMS Global Learning Impact Awards. “The IMS Global Learning Impact Award is internationally recognised and that really gave us a lot of attention because it‘s a global international education award,” Chhoy said. “We were 18 months old as a company and competing against a lot of established players with multi-million dollar budgets and came third, that’s not bad.”