Promoting materials science and engineering education through 3d printing technology

In 2015, the Michigan State Board of Education voted to adopt new Michigan Science Standards that heavily draw on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Among all the performance expectations from these science standards, incorporating high school engineering design requires more effective collaboration between K-12 teachers, higher educators, scientists, and engineers. Without such collaborative effort, K-12 teachers could face tremendous challenges for the design and implementation of meaningful engineering education lessons that could meet the standards. Summarized in this paper are the design and implementation of materials science and engineering educational research offered to high school rising seniors in summer 2019. The summer training program provides students an opportunity to learn the design criteria for fabricating bone scaffolds and to gain capability of breaking down a complex real-world problem into small problems that can be answered in laboratory set-up, which meet both the Michigan State Science Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. Through this summer training program, students learned to relate the structures of several polymers to their physical properties, design 3D objects with various geometrical infills by using computer aided design (CAD) and slicing software, fabricate 3D-pringting objects, perform compression tests, analyze stress-strain characterization results, conduct statistical life data analysis, and relate research results to real-world problems.