Market Day Exemplars: iPad and iPhone Stands

 

Challenge: Using creativity, innovation and personalisation students from a Y3/4 classroom create a unique product for our school market day.

Background: 

This has been a design and creation that has been visited several times in the past and we were able to use some of the examples previously created by students as a discussion point for this year. This was a detailed example from 2018, this example from 2019 included a storage draw beneath the stand or an example from last year created by a seven year old from our school.

This group in the classroom had some of the students who design ideas and creations had been some of the strongest items this year.   They had originally looked at ideas but by focussing on the three criteria for our 2025 School Market Day the students settled on looking to design personalised iPad and iPhone/cellphone stands.

As a basis for their designs they used the stand template that is available on the main Tinkercad interface.   They were then able to resize, rework and develop this design template to include personalisation in form of the names of the person or the things that they might have liked.  An early example of the prototype which they ended up using was this exemplar of an iPad stand which had a high degree of personalisation.   Following this example they also used Tinkercads AR/VR tool to prototype some of the designs and then send them to people who had ordered them for further feedback to develop their ideas.   

The final major development step for the students was to include the Roland Versa Sign Maker to apply a vinyl sticker to some of the designs.  This meant that they could include details and a finish that could not be completed using scribble to design in Tinkercad.  

You can see the original post about the evolution of this project by clicking on the link here. 

Level of Difficulty: Medium.   The initial template for this work did indeed come from the Tinkercad interface however the students were able to develop it further to ensure that each one became unique with a high degree of design and creation.   There was a bit of trial and error with the additional shapes and cartoons that were added to the stands, some being more successful than others.  

An example of this approach is seen below - a student wanted a sports logo from a team, the students from my classroom felt the design would be too challenging but what they were able to do was locate a coaster, invert the coaster and then imbed the coaster into the design for the stand.

Size:These were some of the largest items that were produced for the Market Day this year by our classroom and that by its very nature limited the numbers that we were able to produce.  They also had a degree of personalisation in that each one was unique.   The phone stands typically were 80mm across and 80mm wide or deep.  The iPad stands had to be larger and were 120mm by 120mm.

Cost/Profit: We created a price scale of $5.00 for the iPhone stands and $7.00 for the iPad stands.  This was essentially just above break even point.   Once we had the concept developed and worked on the students realised that they could have raised this point however they felt that they would not be able to do this as this would disadvantage the people who had preordered.   Given the response from the Market Day that was created by customers seeing them for the first time there were a number of people who attempted to order them at this point.

Timeframe: Six hours for a iPad stand and three and a half hour for the iPhone stand (this was using the Bambu printer in terms of finishing and also timeframe.  We could have opted for the Snapmaker but the fine detail we would expect would typically not be there.

What we would do differently/next steps for the students:  The timeframe for each of these objects and the design that went into them limited what could be produced by the students and they couldn't practically produce something quickly in response to that.  We would potentially develop things such as the group using Tnkercad to create Minecraft versions of their designs further.