Over the years, 3D printing has become an increasingly valuable staple in both Engineering and Enterprise. In the School of Engineering's newly introduced and quickly developing Swetman Makerspace, students have access to tools and guidance designed to build skills and hands-on experience—empowering them to unlock their creativity, bring their ideas to life, and prepare them to tackle a wide variety of challenges with inventive and unique solutions.

Learning to “Make” is an enriching experience, and access to the tools is an incredible gift to engineering students.

3D printing has an outstanding range of applications, including creating complex and perfectly tailored pieces for a larger project, prototyping an idea to see if it will work how you think it will, and making interesting and personalized knickknacks. We encourage students to push the boundaries of what they can create but are currently limited by the 3D printers we have.

Multimedia 3D printers can work with several different types of material in one print. This allows for a much wider range of complexity in designs and makes it possible to use removable support materials, which enables easy printing of shapes that would otherwise be impossible or incredibly difficult to print. It also has the added benefit of allowing prints to be multi-colored. The Swetman Makerspace has a version of a multimedia 3D printer. Still, its use is restricted by the limited types of material it is able to work with and the prohibitively high price of those materials.

Your gift today will help purchase a Prusa XL 5-Toolhead 3D printer. Prusa is an industry leader in 3D printing. This printer can print in an area over four times the size of the current 3D printers and can print with a wide array of different materials—many of which are significantly more affordable!

The current Prusa printer models are single-material and much smaller. They are already some of the most used equipment in engineering’s new Swetman Makerspace. They have already helped support a great number of projects, and students frequently ask about upgrading to newer models with more capabilities.

Support for this fund helps provide the resources students are asking for directly. You will be helping to acquire a piece of cutting-edge equipment that we have no doubt will be in constant use and high demand from a manufacturer we have tried and proven to be reliable and of the highest quality.

Donate today and help make something special!