3D Printed Junior Designs: Earrings

 

Challenge: The new term has started and as a result of this we looked at focussing on a class wide challenge, one that would allow the students a freedom or open design, but one that would realistically be able to printed on a single machine in a short space of time.

Background: The design criteria was to create a pair of earrings.  The earrings needed to original (see details below) created and sized by the students.   The students who are Y3/4 (seven and eight years old) needed to be able to demonstrate the size of the designs, show what they had designed themselves and how they might be displayed.     This allowed the students to be creative and bounce ideas off each other.   The designs were created in Tinkercad where a classroom space has been set up (as detailed previously Tinkercad has an exception teacher/classroom interface for designs and creations and potential collaboration.

The students were instruction to complete using their iPads and bring the teacher the finished product for printing.    Designs were then typically copied or duplicated once complete.  Most had been produced using the basic main Tinkercad interface.

Once the design had been completed the students needed to include a way for the design to be hung from the ears, in most cases this is by introducing a hole into the design, as shown in the photograph.   

Level of Difficulty: Low.  Complete in ten minutes (on average by students who are seven and eight years old).   There are some students who have added additional features to the designs to make them slightly more complex however this intended as a project to get the students completing a design which would be successful and printed in a short turn around.

Once the designs were finished and the first prints completed then the next stage was to ask the students what needs to be changed or what could be adapted.  In the example shown by the ducks left the student made the decision to resize them slightly.  The original was 30mm high and 20mm wide.  the student wanted to make them more 'duck like' so reduced the size from the one in the left to the one on the right which reduced its height to 20mm.

The ducks were potentially the easiest design of the set as they were a combination of two predesigned shapes from the Tinkercad interface 

Timeframe: This design challenge was completed with the intention of a class set being completed in two to three days of school.  The prints all had slightly different print times, ranging from ten minutes for the smaller of the ducks (photograph three), the 'G' for Grandma prints (forty minutes both) and forty five minutes for the circular designs shown in photograph ones.   We were able to use as examples some of the prints that have previously featured on this blog - from our school market day

to our students who have run small scale design businesses and sold the earrings via the public.

Size:  In the three examples shown to illustrate this post - the circular designs shown in photograph one were 50mm in length, 25mm wide and were 5mm thick.   The 'G' pair were slightly bigger, they were 10mm thick, 60mm high and 40mm wide.   There were some dispute over whether these were too big to worn as effective earrings.     The pair of ducks, which is photograph three, were 25mm across 20mm high and were 10mm thick.    These were scaled down as noted.

What we would do differently/next steps for students: These are not a single print but a series of class prints, and they are going to evolve in the course of the next few days.   We would like each student to revise the print, and look at what they could potentially change, for example the reshaping of the ducks to make it more duck like.