Our ideal bee project involved a good deal of ideation and preparation that ultimately led to the creation of a new class of bees for the hive. Since students had only a few guidelines on what to make the bee out of and were told to make any changes to the bee they wanted; there were near infinite possibilities. This presented a unique challenge in creatively adding something significant to the current bee model while still producing something that logically would give the bees an evolutionary advantage. While my group came up with a lot of different ideas on would constitute an “ideal” bee we eventually narrowed it down to coming up with a method to better protect bees from diseases and parasites. This led into the creation of the “medical bee” role in the hive. This bee would be better suited to remove parasites and inject antibodies, acting as a sort of immune system for the hive itself. As a result, we decided that the bee would not need wings as it would live the entirety of its life cycle inside the hive. With this image in mind, we decided to create our model using TinkerCad and the Ultimaker 3 in the maker space. While I was not familiar with using the program or the 3D printer, there was someone else in the group who had a little experience and was definitely a learning experience going through this process.
This proved to be a very challenging experience, and as such was very enjoyable and rewarding for me as it stretched my comfort zone out a little more. As an aspiring medical professional, I had never imagined I would be involved in a project like this that so heavily involves creative design and implements three-dimensional printing technology. A lot of the work I am doing on a day to day basis involves very technical work and memorization of different fields in science with the goal being to help me understand the human body better. While I have attended a seminar that outlined how new technology is being implemented into medicinal practice including an overview of 3D printing, I never truly expected to be able to use it myself for a project such as this.
This proved to be a very challenging experience, and as such was very enjoyable and rewarding for me as it stretched my comfort zone out a little more. As an aspiring medical professional, I had never imagined I would be involved in a project like this that so heavily involves creative design and implements three-dimensional printing technology. A lot of the work I am doing on a day to day basis involves very technical work and memorization of different fields in science with the goal being to help me understand the human body better. While I have attended a seminar that outlined how new technology is being implemented into medicinal practice including an overview of 3D printing, I never truly expected to be able to use it myself for a project such as this.