After applying for receiving a $2,500 new equipment grant, woodshop teacher Monty Enright was able to expand his teaching methods through a tool of the future: a 3-D printer.

“I taught 16 years at the tech school [MATC] and we bought a 3-D printer there about six years ago. It allowed us to teach a couple different aspects to our students,” Enright said.

He felt that the edition of the printer added a new depth to the skill developing and learning process.

“With CAD [computer aided design] we can draw 3-D and the 3-D you draw with CAD usually looks beautiful, but sometimes the computer lies to your eyes and so when we bought the printer we figured out we could save it to file and make the part,” Enright said. “The nice part about it is if the model was drawn correctly with the correct processes the computer will build it. If they missed some steps in the building phase the 3-D printer would reject it.”

He’s confident the purchase and experience of working with the printer will be beneficial to students in their future careers.

“The benefit I see is for our kids interested in engineering or CAD will benefit from not only the 3-D training but they’ll also benefit from the engineering side — just ‘do things go together and fit correctly?’” Enright said.

When students draw blueprints and designs it can look like it’ll work and if they never see a physical copy they don’t know if it actually will. Now that they can make designs and then actually print them students are able to make actual progress and see the results of their sketching.

“Like I always tell them — you learn up when you fail. So you’ve got this part and it looks great on the screen and then you go print it and you realize its not what you wanted. So then you start over or make adjustments and come out with something that works,” Enright said.