188-8 3D Printing for Field-Based Geoscience Education

Session: Technology and tools for 3D visualization of field and lab data in teaching and research

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Fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers are widely available, inexpensive, and simple to operate, making them well suited to field education.

The Lightning Strike and Dip Frisbee target a persistent problem in field mapping instruction, getting students to build maps and structural hypotheses while still in the field. The Lightning Strike plots strike and dip symbols through a stencil on a rotating window over a fixed 0-360° bezel; students set it directly from their compass measurement and trace the symbol onto their map, without a ruler or mental math for strikes over 180°. The Dip Frisbee, a 3D-printed version of a device described in Pettijohn and Potter's Paleocurrents and Basin Analysis, is a flat disk with a bubble level marking the line of strike and a shelf that rests a Brunton compass parallel to that line. This splits the strike measurement into aligning the compass on the shelf, then tilting it level, removing the twisting motion students often struggle to learn. A perpendicular line on the disk then guides the dip measurement to exactly 90° from strike, correcting a common error made when resetting the compass after reading strike. This procedure lowers the barrier to data collection and, anecdotally, students plot data throughout the day instead of at its end.

FDM printing also turns reference and research data into physical teaching objects. DEMs, freely available from national and international databases, can be processed in QGIS and printed with filament-color changes marking contour intervals, giving students a 3D model of a field area that matches their map's contours and helps them learn to read the landscape while mapping. On the research side, we used photogrammetry to capture flute casts, a sole mark formed when turbulent flow erodes a mud bed that is then capped by sand. As the mud erodes, the negative image of these features is exposed on the base of the sand bed, but the positive image is rarely seen. Extruding the 3D model lets us print that reciprocal surface, an erosional form most students would otherwise never see.

Low-cost FDM printing, paired with free or education-licensed software, lets instructors design, iterate, and widely share custom 3D tools and models that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to develop.

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