Teachers, youths join in virus fight
Faculty members and students from the state’s schools are making contributions in the battle against the contagious and potentially deadly coronavirus.
LISA Academy charter school teachers and students in Pulaski County have been working in their homes and garages with the school’s 3D printers to design and print face shields to donate to Arkansas Children’s hospital and the Arkansas Department of Health.
Murat Konac, STEM coordinator for the school system, collaborated with the hospital engineer, Justin Criddle, and Dr. Naveen Patil of the Arkansas Department of Health, to create models that best meet the needs of health care providers.
Meanwhile, a LISA Academy-Springdale sixth-grader is using his own 3D printer to make ear guards that hold the straps of face masks so they don’t irritate the ears. About 100 of the guards have been sent to locations across the country.
And, in Hot Springs, students and faculty members at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts, a public residential high school for gifted juniors and seniors, is using 3D printing to produce face shields for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
University of Arkansas System President Donald Bobbitt had reached out to the school’s director, Corey Alderdice, for help in producing personal protection equipment, Donnie Sewell, a spokesman for the school, said last week. The school is part of the UA System.
Nicholas Seward, a computer science instructor at the school and a 3-D-printing advocate, is leading the effort using multiple 3-D printers on campus and at other locations to print the basic hardware for the headgear.
Seward is hoping to produce 100 to 120 masks from the 20 printers in a week’s time. It takes about four hours to print a complete mask. On the smaller printers, that includes printing and screwing together four pieces. A transparent plastic screen is attached to the front. An elastic or rubber headband is attached to it to hold it in place.
Alliance Rubber Co. in Hot Springs is contributing headbands for the shields. The company normally produces rubber bands but recently switched its manufacturing line to produce the rubber strips to attach to face shields nationwide, Sewell said.