Many students take $1000 and put it towards personal expenses.
Junior Greg Cook put his 2008 Catharine A. Gerber Award money toward building a machine that could potentially revolutionize the art, architecture and manufacturing industries.
Cook, an interdisciplinary studies major, was fascinated with the self-replicating machine called RepRap (short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper). After securing funding from the Gerber Award, used his money to complete his own RepRap project.
RepRap uses computer-based models created out of programming code, to create objects by layering thermoplastic polymers on a platform. The machine can create objects ranging from a flyswatter to a pair of shoes to a door handle.
Cook said this machine would be ideal for architecture students to use, as they can quickly create models by simply programming the computer model into the machine, and then letting the machine create the object out of plastic polymers.
"It actually can make objects from design files," Cook said. "It can produce basically anything you want."
According to RepRap's official Web site, scientists behind RepRap have high hopes for the machine, and think it could cut out manufacturing businesses and allow consumers to become their own manufacturers.
"Today, virtually everyone in the developed world runs their own printing works, their own photographic laboratory, and their own CD-pressing plant," the Web site reads. "Why shouldn't they also make their own MP3-players, their own coat hooks and their own car wing mirrors?"
However, many skeptics of the project fear that the self-replicating RepRap device can become self-destructive, as the machine can continue to create new and improved versions of itself.
However, Cook's machine will not have the same self-replicating abilities.
"It can't make itself and take over the world," he joked.
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Cook said he came up with the idea for the RepRap machine while thinking of ideas to win the Gerber Award last year, given annually to a Western College Program student for the use of technology in an academic venture.
As of press time, Cook said he has completed 95 percent of the electronics in the machine and 60 percent of the hardware. The key part of the project, the plastic extrusion device, has yet to be completed.
Cook received help from electrical engineer Fred Lehnman, who is the husband of a Western College for Women alumna. Lehnman and Cook met during the Western College's alumni weekend in October. Lehnman recognized a short circuit in Cook's project and the two worked together to tweak the electronics of the machine.
Cook said that if Lehnman visits again, they can complete the RepRap project in a few days. Lehnman says he plans to visit Miami again, as his wife is on the board of alumni for Western College.
"It's exciting to work with (Cook)" he said. "He seems eager to pursue things out of the ordinary ... it's exciting that a student that's not of a technical discipline (would) tackle something like this."
For more information on the RepRap project, including videos of the machine in action, go to http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome.
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