3D printing, quick and economical, offers innovative teaching and learning experiences across campus.

Sophia Yu ’25 strolls around a large room in Notre Dame’s Engineering Innovation Hub, checking on progress in one 3D printer and removing a completed student project from another. She’s preparing the next design in the computer queue. Even with 38 3D printers in this room and the next, it’s not unusual for nearly all the devices to be running at once.

“Toward the end of the semester, it’s so busy in here,” says Yu, an aerospace engineering major. She works part time in the hub, uses it to produce her own class projects and has helped craft prototype rocket parts here as the payload design lead for the Notre Dame Rocketry Team, which participates in an annual national competition.

Three-dimensional printing — also known as additive manufacturing — is a process that creates a physical object from a digital model. Different printers may produce objects made of different materials, including plastics and metals.

At locations across campus, 3D printers are used for innovative teaching and learning. The devices offer an economical way to produce quick prototypes for work in engineering, science, architecture, art, entrepreneurship and other fields.

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Originally published by Margaret Fosmoe ’85 at architecture.nd.edu on April 02, 2025.