For the “A Guide to 3D Printing” bundle, the idea is to create a practical guide for people who currently view 3D printing as a black box that creates their desired 3D models in real life.

You may check out the current posts here.

Initial Difficulties

For basically all my life, I’ve always been the learner, never the teacher.

While trying to compile my knowledge into articles, the biggest difficulty I had was with structuring. Since pieces of knowledge tend to be connected with other pieces of knowledge in a web-like way, it is very tricky to structure everything such that the knowledge can be understood linearly.

Additionally, another issue I kept running into is using jargon that I hadn’t yet introduced to the reader.

Takeaway 1

In the beginning, I tried to assume that the user already knows how to design a 3D model, how to slice a file, and how to print their desired model. However, when I considered who might read my article, I realized that assuming everyone’s baseline knowledge might lead to complications further down the line, so I decided to rewrite the first couple modules such that they require no prerequisite knowledge.

Takeaway 2

While writing the first module, I realized that I also need to take into account how I retrieve my knowledge. Structuring everything mentally with the learner in mind is slowing things down a lot since I have a spend more time thinking than writing.

I’ve come up with a compromise, which is a two-pass method. In the first pass, I would “blurt” everything I know into the modules in the order they come to mind in, then the second pass would be for structuring the information once I’ve already extracted it out of me.