Creating a network for 3D Printing in high schools

[CNettles11]

Yesterday, a group of students from team 3556 attended a symposium on 3D printing at Florida State University. One of the speakers was Dr Darrel Wallace, who is the deputy director of America Makes. During the Question and Answer portion of his presentation, I asked if there was a network through which high school students could collaborate, learn, share designs, and discuss additive manufacturing. While the answer was 'no', this did open a dialogue between a few of our team members and Dr Wallace. He said that Make America would be open to supporting such a project.

Here's where we need your help. We'd like to receive input from students about what they'd like to see in this type of network, on topics from website format, to functions that should be available, or even suggesting a name for the project. This is something that we would really like to see take off, and with the explosion of 3D printing and additive manufacturing, we believe that this project would become a very valuable resource for students, teachers and FIRST Robotics teams.