3D Printed Term Three Project Updates

 

Currently our Kickstarter inspired Market Day creation videos are currently online on our school website.   These have had the students focus on innovation and personalisation.   You can view the videos from not only Room Seven but also the senior school in general.

In our class the students have been divided into seven different groups each with four or so students.   The students have used a range of our school equipment including the 3D Printers, with Tinkercad used to create unique projects and also the School Laser Cutter and we will be using the Sticker Machine.

An example is the group producing bath toys, as shown left.  They are refining their designs, looking at what they can create and what design aspects need to be considered.   One of the issues for instance with balance with these creations is that if the top of the design is too heavy it will cause the design itself instead of floating to tip over constantly.

Another of our group is producing beads that when they are linked together spell out the name of the student and also have images and designs on alternative blocks.  These students have been refining their designs to ensure that they cover every letter and improving the design of them (as is sometimes the case the designs can look pleasing in virtual form but when they are subsequently printed they can sometimes loose details.   You can read about their efforts here.

This term we are going to allow the students to process the orders, complete the personalisation, packaging and manufacturing and then have the students collect the designs on the Market Day itself, which is intended to allow the students to create unique products within a time frame that is realistic.

Our structured literacy theme is based around weekly subjects, including cats this week.   The shared reading tasks are a way we wanted to bring CAD design task in for our seven and eight year olds.  Given that the turn around was a single week, including design and there are twenty six students who are in the classroom the prospect of printing an entire run of projects was not realistic at this point (as we have mentioned in the past we have three printers that are available to use school wide).   For this project we printed some of the initial designs and then we used the Tinkercad App and its VR/AR function to complete the design.   This allowed a range of students to produce Tinkercad designs and check their viability prior to potential printing.   We have published a slideshow dedicated to non printing options including using filters which is available via this tab here.  In this example shown above the actual print is on the right, the virtual design is on the left and this is without any additional filters being added to the project.