3D Printing, Teaching Java & Visual Programming

3D printing is an exciting technology. Just recently it has taken off in the maker movement and opened the door to almost unlimited possibilities. 3D printers are now affordable for almost everyone and are an ideal tool for teaching and education. The only problem that remains is designing 3D parts. We solve this with the flexible Java library JCSG that provides a very convenient way to programmatically create 3D geometries. Programmatically designing 3D geometries is a very strong motivator for children (and everybody else) to learn programming and finally producing something that they can touch in the real world! In this session we explain how 3D printing works and give an introduction to JCSG and VRL-Studio, our Visual Programming Environment that we use for teaching and prototyping. It combines visual and text-based programming and automatically creates interactive user interfaces for any Java Object. Attendees get full access to all sample projects that we show in the session. Links: http://vrl-studio.mihosoft.eu/ https://github.com/miho/JCSG http://mihosoft.eu/


Author:
Michael Hoffer
Michael Hoffer is a computer scientist working at the Goethe-Center for Scientific Computing in Frankfurt, Germany and co-founder of Digital Brain Factory. Hoffer is the developer of VRL-Studio, an innovative visual programming environment that combines visual and text-based programming. Currently he is doing his PhD at the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. His research interests are developing visual programming concepts in the field of modeling and simulation of highly complex physical processes. Hoffer's long-term goal is to create a visual general-purpose programming language based on the Java platform. Hoffer blogs about Java, JavaFX, and related technologies at http://mihosoft.eu.

Blog: mihosoft.eu