It would be fantastic if you would give 7 minutes to completing this brief survey http://gg.gg/graduate if you are working in a 3D studio - if you are a TD or supervisor please use http://gg.gg/3Dsupervisor This will really impact education in the creative industries and I do thank you for you time.

Hi Martha,
Firstly, please don't put requests in multiple places in the forum. To re-coin a phrase from LOTR " Geeks are subtle and quick to anger". Reprap is an outpost of the land of Geek, a fact that makes the questionnaire that you want members of the RepRap community to fill in less than useful.

Perhaps I should clarify a bit: At the beginning of your survey you ask about the standard things, Sex, age, nationality (or country). Members of the RepRap community are far more divided along such lines as "PLA or ABS", "Cartesian or Delta", "ABS slurry or Printbite", and a great many others, some of which are held with a fanatical conviction. On the few occasions where you meet the people behind the names on the RepRap forum you will often find that the picture you had in your minds eye is wrong in many or most respects - dress code, sex, colour, age etc..

Geeks are by nature driven by fascination with one or many subjects which may be totally unrelated to how they earn the daily crust; the education that they suffered to earn that crust may also be unrelated to their areas of interest. Many will in fact not have the formal education that your questionnaire presupposes but may still have a depth of understanding of their chosen fields above the knowledge of the pros.

Questions such as "My educational institution comprehensively prepared me for my current role." will usually generate the response of Huh?! The many "Program of Learning" questions would again get a blank response.

In summary: If you don't want your graphs peppered by outliers then don't gather your data from beyond the left field.

Mike

Brilliant post. Enough said.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

Mike,
That is the best reply I think I have ever read here. Well done!

As a 60 year old carpet laying 3d printer enthusiust and high school dropout, I agree.