Engineering Forum - 3D Imaging

Wow, has it been a while since my last post.  Blogging hasn't been my priority since I have been teaching since the beginning of the semester.  It's March Break now though so I thought I would try to fit in some blogging.

3D Imaging Technology

Last night, I attended this year's Engineering Innovations Forum at the Ontario Science Centre with a few of my Engineering friends.  The topic of discussion was 3D imaging technology.  The presenters talked about 3D scanning and modelling for Construction Design, Forensic and Medical applications.  There is some really cool and interesting tech out there.  Particularly interesting to me was the discussion of Photogrammetry (using photographs to find measurements and model in 3D).  Eugene Liscio, president of AI2 3D talked about how taking pictures with any digital camera can be used to generate a 3D model which he uses in Forensic applications.  He mentioned the Autodesk app 123D Catch, which can create a 3D model from photographs with any Apple mobile device.  Pretty neat.  Now how could I use this in my classes?  Something to think about over the next week...

3D Printing Technology

Turning 3D computer models into tangible objects for the Medical field was the theme for another one of the presenters.  You must check out the pictures at this link for 3D Printed casts.  They look awesome.

Breathing

Anyways, the presenter talked about how he was involved in designing a mask to be used to analyze breathing in sleep studies.  He needed to find the optimal spot for the microphone so it picked up the sound of breathing from the nose and mouth at the same time.  To find where to put it, they went outside when it was cold and snapped a picture of the condensing breath.  They used this to find the ideal location of the microphone.  The picture he showed us looked something like this (red lines indicate direction of breath):

Application problem time!  My Grade 10's are starting the unit on solving linear systems so I could get them to overlay an axis and grid on the picture and determine the location of the ideal microphone spot.  Here is a screencap of a Geogebra model of it that I threw together.  I didn't scale it to the size of the face but that would be necessary to solve the problem:

Also, here's a link to a Desmos graph of the same thing.

This could be a quick activity to show the students how this stuff can actually be used in real-life.

And then they could use their answers to design a mask which could be printed on the school's 3D printer.... ok maybe that's not that realistic yet.  It would be AWESOME if every school had a 3D printer.  Only $2500 each!  Somebody needs to get on that.  Real-world problem solving to the MAX.

This is why I still go to Engineering events when I can.  It gives me some ideas for presenting concepts in new ways and helps me stay current with the technology that's out there.  Engineering PD is teaching PD for me as a math/science teacher.