Mike Ransford is the most “hands-on” teacher at Springfield Middle School.
By using 3D printers, he is teaching students about prosthetics and about life.
“The more I teach, the more I realize I want to be the teacher that gives kids activities instead of worksheets,” he said.
Starting this school year, Mr. Ransford has been taking that idea to the extreme, teaching eighth-grade students in his pre-engineering technology class how to make prosthetic hands, printed on a fleet of 3D printers that he has in his classroom, mostly purchased through an Ohio Learning Network grant he received last spring.
Thus far, his students are loving it.
“I think this class is really fun because we get to make some cool projects,” said Jack Miller, an eighth grader in the second of two morning sessions of pre-engineering technology. “I think it is a lot better than normal classes because we get to build things.”
Jack said he liked how the class progressed from creating a hand out of cardboard to 3D printing a hand and how he was able to move on and improve a little bit each time, specifically mentioning how he was able to get a lot better at producing the string that opens and closes each hand.
These characteristics are things that Jack values because he wants to be an engineer one day.
“It definitely interests me,” he said of following a career path in the engineering field when he grows up. “I have always liked to build things, even when I was really young, I just found it really interesting.”
By the end of the school year, there will be 48 ready-to-use hands, eight for each of the six classes he will teach, created in the Holland classroom with the goal of donating them to Enabling the Future, an international organization that gets prosthetics to those that need them.
“If our hands get approved, we will become one of their partners,” Mr. Ransford said, noting that these printers are tools and that each hand takes approximately 30 hours to print. “Then we can partner with anyone locally, and if we can do something to help, why not?”
Enabling the Future works with a Chicago-based company called BitSpace which provides the curriculum for the pre-engineering technology class, starting with the creation of the cardboard hand and learning the anatomy of a hand.
This then leads to the creation of a hand through Lego-like pieces, which led to the project with the printers that the students are finishing up now.
Mr. Ransford is bringing multiple learning aspects into the classroom, including a desire to help those in need and knowledge of the scientific method.
As the instructor of the class, he has to work long hours, sometimes setting the printers up after school, returning and letting them run overnight. Still, everything is a teaching moment, and Mr. Ransford said his kids know how to troubleshoot certain common mistakes during the printing process by taking a “that’s interesting” or “cool, how did that happen” attitude towards making a mistake.
“Five years ago, I knew nothing about 3D printing,” said Mr. Ransford, who worked on 3D printing face shields during the coronavirus pandemic. “I am teaching my students how to learn through failure. I share all of my mistakes.”
He pointed out a stack of hands near the wall, where all of the palms came out except one.
“This one is not usable,” he said. “I had to figure out why that was, and it was the nozzle. I have been running these printers so much and at such a high temperature that the nozzle is toast and I need to replace it. That is just one of the things you do not know when you jump into something like this.”
Much of the grades for the class come from written student reflections, where they let Mr. Ransford know how they feel aspects of the project went. Mr. Ransford said he also does a lot of observing to see how students are working together in teams, one of the key aspects of the project that has major implications in the real world.
“We traffic a lot in conflict resolution, perseverance and problem solving,” he said. “These are life skills and this class is where all the subjects come together like the math, the science and the writing. You have to be able to communicate. It is the whole engineering design process.”
First Published October 14, 2022, 8:30 p.m.
