3D Printed Earrings - Part Three Additional Designs

 

Challenge/Background: As detailed in a series of posts that have been detailed on this blog the students have started the term in New Zealand with an individual design challenge to customise a pair of earrings designed using Tinkercad.

In the designs shown left the student created two seperate designs, one for themselves and another which was intended as a gift.  They had similarities in design featuring a heart, a name and a star design on the base.  Each of these prints measured 60mm high, was 50mm across and 10mm thick,   As a consequence of this the print time of each of the prints was forty five minutes.  A discussion was made about whether or not these earrings were in fact not suitable for purpose as they were too large.   The student did not think so however it was commented by another student 'that they would make a great Christmas star' which was a reflection of its size.    The student is at this stage not intending to redesign the project as she believes it has been completed.  The student concerned is a Y3 student who is seven years old who is 3D Printing in her classroom for the first time this year.

A similar design was completed by the student who design the pair on the left.   They were crated in the main Tinkercad interface

Again as the design above there were three main components to the design.   The background or base of the design, the name that was applied and the hole that was inserted into the design to hang the earring.  Significantly the time to print each of these designs was reduced by nearly half of the ones above as they were 5mm thick.   The student who design these prints was a Y4 who has worked on a number of projects in the classroom this year and last.

She was able to complete this task independently from any teacher input and the result was just printed by the teacher.   

In the third example shown left this student opted to create a minimalist design - she had experience with earrings and wanted to make sure that they were as small and thin as practically possible.  

The print time for these designs were only 12 minutes for each earring, they were 50mm high and crucially 5mm thick.   The student used the 'scribble' design to make the shape of the star shown left.   The student enjoyed the fact that these were unique.  She considered putting additional details into the design however was very concerned with applying a basic level of detail to ensure that the design was light-weight and was able to be printed in a extremely short time frame.  Again a student, in this case eight years old who was able to complete the design independently and the teachers role in this instance was again to just print the finished product.