School Holiday Challenge: Earrings 2026 Edition

 

Challenge: For students to use their iPad, Tinkercad (app or web browser) and a 3D Printer to produce an original pair of earrings.

Background: Due to the nature of the design, the simplicity that it is possible to complete the task with and also the printing time - this has evolved into a standard creation, production and printing task for the students.

As the term was coming to the end we used this as a challenge where we spoke to the students - we also wanted to make it clear to the students that if they continue to design, create and make in the School Holidays here in New Zealand we will be able to print their designs during the break so they will be ready for their collection after the break.

In this instance having being regularly posting on this site for many years this is one of the tasks that we have a wealth of examples from - from one off basic designs to students who have created entire micro-businesses with the concept and used it for previous school Market Days.   You can view the links to all of these posts on this blog or use the search bar top right and use the term 'earrings' to see pages and pages of potential examples.   You can click on this link to the 2023 project which started as a design task  and then evolved into this 2023 Market Day business.

We also had students switch to the laser cutter in 2024 or you can view the Pac-Man super slim examples from 2021 by clicking on this link here.  This summary slideshow created in 2025 contains all of the steps from start to finish in the process - aimed very much at a teacher carrying this out as an activity with an entire classroom.

Size: As shown from the design plate on Tinkercad is 80mm long and 30mm wide the print are also 10mm wide.

Cost/Price: Using the Bambu Lab studio software we are able to determine that to print both of the pair would take 14g and has a price point of $0.33.

Timeframe: To print both of these it took twenty three minutes to complete using the Bambu H2D.  This task would be ideal to print using a slower printer or a printer that was not able to create the detail that more complicated prints require.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the student: This is a very basic introductory task that the students in the classroom could complete easily and we have had student complete some basic designs after being shown the app and how to create basic designs.   This task also leads to more complicated designs from the students.    This is designed for the students to be successful in a short space of time.

We have a slideshow as described - on our Facebook Page we have included a copy of the slideshow as a downloadable slideshow in powerpoint format.  You can click on the link to that here.