3D Printing as a Gateway to Science
Written by Joe Sheppard
I’d be extremely curious right now to see how popular science is in secondary schools. In my time at
secondary school during the early days of social media, science was still considered an old fashioned
subject, and with good reason as the majority of chemistry and physics classes focused on scientif-
ic contributions made hundreds of years ago, thus leading a lot of students to become disillusioned
with the scientific process.
Recently however there has been a
significant increase in the publishing
and transparency of modern scientific
journals and methods, to make sci-
ence more accessible for the public.
This is achieved through journals such
as JoVE (journal of visualised experi-
ments) where you can watch video tu-
torials of highly specialised scientific
methods, as well as a huge increase
in science publicity via social media,
with websites like I f*cking love sci-
ence achieving over 24m subscribers
clearly there is an interest in science
outside of academia. Anyone wish-
ing to act on this information and to
really develop an interest in science
would find it pretty hard though since
people need to get hands on with the
subject, which in my school at least –
constituted a short trip to go and look
at some pond life, and little else. So as
a neuroscientist it is still common for
me when talking about my work to be
met with an impressed but moderate-
ly apprehensive expression, and this
is because what people are taught in
school can discourage them from sci-
ence, and in any case what they chose
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to read online these days is a million
miles away from the Bunsen burner
centered classroom. Ultimately what
people are taught and what people
have access to are two completely dif-
ferent things in science.
In order to reduce the disparity be-
tween those within science and those
who are interested, science needs to
change its tactics, particularly the sec-
ondary institutions and adopt a more
hands on approach, but this is exactly
the reason science field trips got to be
so boring, cool science requires lasers
and 2-Photon microscopes and other
exciting sounding, ridiculously expen-
sive lab equipment. But this might not
necessarily always be the way, thanks
to two things, the open-source move-
ment, which we’ll come back to, and a
non-profit organisation called Teach-
ing and Research in Natural sciences
for Development in African (or TReND).
You see, all of these concerns originate
from an educational disparity between
what’s possible in the classroom and
what is possible in the laboratory. But
what if these two places need not
be separate, certainly it isn’t for late
stage PhD candidates.
The real issue is that this disparity is
all over the world, and astronomically
higher in less developed countries
where the problem is complicated by
an economic divide that strengthens
this separation. This we must accept
for now, as some developing countries
have more immediate concerns than
education, be it political instability or
environmental loss, but significant
progress is being made, particularly in
sub-Saharan Africa , toward reducing
both world hunger and controlling the
spread of diseases, with some coun-
tries even exceeding the millennial de-
velopmental goals set for food supply
and sanitation, making the time right
for the development of education in
Nigeria or south Africa for example.
TReND aims to do just that through
the organisation of large scale hands
on science classes, hosted at or nearby
higher educational institutions where
aspiring science students are taught
the essential bench-based skills of the