District 7 Highlights: 3-D printers making an imprint at Southwest College

Jun 26, 2014

‌Excitement over 3-D printers continues to replicate at Houston Community College Southwest. The latest addition in the college's hardware upgrade is the Stratasys Objet Eden 260 V, or "Eden." The 3-D printers are designed to create physical objects.

"We are going from 3-D printers that are fairly common to a high end industrial printer that our students have access to," said Roland Fields, Technical Support Supervisor for HCC Southwest about Eden.

The printer is now online and uses more than a dozen materials, including hard plastic and rubber, which, according to Fields, "provides a wider range of materials and much higher resolutions." Upon inspection of a rubber-like dinosaur head printed by Eden, one can easily see the well-defined ridges.‌

Also at the Stafford Campus is the MakerBot 3-D printer. The MakerBot 3-D printer gives students an inexpensive and easy way to program interactive objects like hobby robotics and small-scale drone aircraft.  It uses ABS, a material used to make Lego blocks, to create everything from 3-D model homes to bones and joints in medicine.

HCC Southwest showcased the MakerBot 3-D printer at Comicpalooza 2014 in May at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Comicpalooza is the largest show of this type for the general public and features various sci-fi and fantasy events. This year’s convention included demonstrations of the MakerBot 3-D printer. The MakerBot 3-D printer is an interesting intersection of imagination, creativity, and futurism. It was a perfect fit for Comicpalooza, turning fantasy into reality.

With Eden's addition, there are now six 3-D printers housed at the Stafford and West Loop campuses. Plans are underway to add a seventh 3-D printer. Students who learn 3-D printing technology will be valuable employees in the workforce of the future.