Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Starting The New School Year: 3D Printed Class Badges

The depth of the badge and size means it is extremely functional
3D Print School: Classroom Badge Design 

Learning Challenge: Students design a badge for the classroom.

Background: Searching for a task to tie in with a introduction to the classroom and basic design.  We discussed a 'badge' idea as a building task and it was completed literally by a student.

Task: Design a badge for the classroom that was unique.

Level of Difficulty: Low/Moderate - the student concerned created this model on his second attempt working with Tinkercad.  The original design came in with a 28 hour print time and the refined version, shown above, was much more stripped back - duration was an hour.

Students Tinkercad Design Prior to conversion for 3D Printing
Issues: The design had the letters linked, in the first version the letters weren't linked but were backed on a stand.  This design besides reducing the build time considerably also ended up looking better as a result.

Details: Completed by a Y5 student with his second ever build.  He was able to manipulate the design process with Tinkercad easily and produce something straightforward but also extremely effective.

Timeframe; One hour for print.  Design was thirty minutes, which reflected the students first use
of software.

Size: Length of 10cm, width of 6cm and a depth of 5 mm.

Problem Solving: The students original design idea on paper proved somewhat difficult to translate directly to Tinkercad as he had to incorporate a local landmark that was difficult to replicated.  This caused him to concentrate on the lettering, which while striking was not the focus of the original design.

One unexpected bonus was the size of the print made it an ideal badge size - something the student is keen to focus on, with a current idea of backing the badge with a pin to allow it to be worn.  As an extension activity the student is going to design a visitors badge for all visitors for the school to wear and look at producing a set for the office.

2 comments:

  1. I love the concept of a school visitor badge. Could you not hot glue gun on a safety pin?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes but we also thought that adding in a box for the safety pin would be a bit of a challenge and would look better overall, so that's what we want to do next for this task.

    ReplyDelete