Looking for a Tyrannosaurus rex figure for your home or classroom and the $8.36 million price tag (paid for Sue, the largest, best preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found) seems a bit high for your budget? Then how does $14.99 at the MAKERBOT DIGITAL STORE for an anatomically correct, realistic, scale model of a full Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton sound? Not only is the MAKERBOT Tyrannosaurus Rex model a lot less of a budget buster, but it's going to be a lot easier to lug from classroom to classroom -- even in death, Sue’s skeleton weighs 3922 lbs.
MAKERBOT, as you are probably aware, makes affordable desktop 3-D printers and scanners for the home, the classroom and for businesses. These products have won top awards from Popular Mechanics, Time Magazine and Popular Science. Working with their products keeps kids engaged in the moment and learning as they go. The MAKERBOT Tyrannosaurus Rex for example, allows students the chance to become involved with the new manufacturing paradigm called Additive Manufacturing -- it creates products through sequential layering, much as the natural world does. “3D printing,” says President Obama, “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.”
We're not just talking about learning from the process of building things here, we are also talking about the things we are building. This same Tyrannosaurus rex sculpture is more than an object lesson in manufacturing, it also makes an excellent teaching tool in history and geology classes. This dinosaur is not the blob of molded plastic we give to our three-year olds to play with or an imaginative picture in a textbook, this is an actual scale model of the skeleton that supported the beast 65 million years ago. There are a lot more great educational templates and accompanying curricula to be found at the MAKERBOT Digital Store or at Thingiverse.com where over 100,000 different templates for 3D printers are free.
Keeping students interested and engaged is a priority for educators everywhere. Luckily for this generation of students -- and teachers -- technology exists right now that makes this easier to accomplish than ever before. Affordable technology! Technology that means if you can’t afford a real T Rex skeleton - -and who can -- and you don’t have the budget to transport your class to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago to see Sue on display, you can go online and download the next best thing!