It is accurate to say that everybody knows what a printer is – a device that puts information on paper. Fast-forward to the 21-century, and printers still have a place in the world. Although now, the most common form of a printer is one which prints information from the computer onto paper. There are a variety of printers available to do this including inkjet, laser and dot-matrix – the latter of which is no longer in common usage (thankfully).
In a similar way that the aforementioned computer printers print 2-dimensional information onto paper, 3-dimensional printers can create objects using plastic. This is done using a heated nozzle laying down layers of molten plastic in a pre-defined pattern. The layers (which are commonly a fraction of a millimetre thick) eventually build up into an object.
Computing@CCCU 