3D Printed Harold the Giraffe

 

Challenge: To create a unique, authentic model of a giraffe.

Background: The students have had a recent visit from the Life Education Trust who visit many schools across New Zealand during the school year.  The mascot for this is Harold the Giraffe.   After a recent visit to Auroa Primary School one of our students decided to use this as the opportunity to create an original.   Getting the dimensions right was always going to be a significant challenge, the students made the decision to look at examples that they might be able to copy off and collected information and details from online sources, including visuals.   

The students for design purposes for this task used Tinkercad.   This is the tool that the students of Auroa Primary School (Room Seven) and others use in conjunction with their iPads.  The students used the main building blocks from the design to shape the torso and legs, before starting to manipulate the design using more subtle and smaller features (the ears were a good example of this process).

The students were able to colour match their design as shown in the original screenshot (although as a single colour print this would need to be addressed) and either coloured or an attempt made to use a multi coloured print run by using the Bambu H2D.

The patches themselves at present need addressing - as they don't wrap around the design, instead sticking out, and there is ample parts of the print.

Resources used to complete this print: iPad, Tinkercad, Bambu H2D, Lime Green Bambu PLA.

Level of Difficulty: Medium/High: This challenge has a number of layers to it and creating the dimensions the scale, the details is a challenge.   This student has been consistently one of the students this year who has shown creativity and a unique perspective with their designs.   The student is extremely self motivated and is able to drive themselves to continue to improve and develop their designs.   They have already indicated that they are going to revise this design extensively to get it better.

Size: The print is currently 50mm across and is 110mm high.   The body of the animal is 50mm by 30mm by 30mm.   The legs are 30mm high.

Cost/Price: To complete this print the printer used 26g of PLA this has a price point of $0.54 for the print.

Timeframe: The print took one hour and fifty minutes to complete this print, on standard settings (a default infill of twenty per cent).

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: The design needs to be revised - the patches need to blend into the body (as they currently stick outwards).   The feet of the design and the base of the feet could be developed further.   While the student has created a form of expression with the facial details there are further adjustments that need to be made, to the shape and detailing in the face.

We are also pointing the students to the Flexi Giraffe that was a design from 2022 featured on this blog.   There was also a 2023 business for our school Market Day that featured giraffes you can click on the link to that post here.

The student who is responsible for this post is nine years old.

Completed Project: Ooshie Stand

 

Those of you who are regular visitors to this blog while have been following the progress of the five tier 'Ooshie Stand'.   This has been sourced from Thingiverse.   To hold the entire run of the designs each level consists of eight holding spots - five levels allowed the entire run of forty designs to be displayed.

The decision has been made to spray paint the entire design in a single colour (which is purple as shown left).   The design was completed as noted in stages and each section was able to be screwed into the section above it.

This allowed the design to be put together successfully for a price point of under $10.00.   It also has the bonus of allowing the forty different characters to be transported without them falling off the design as each is held in place by an individual peg.

This is another example of using a pre-made design or feature and creating a interest and design for discussion and sharing with adults and also students.

Versa Studio Sign Maker - T-Shirts

 

We've posted many times about our senior students and their DPE (Design Production Engineering) program).   A recent group of students have completed their rotations and amongst this group of students we have a group completing their digital media projects with our amazing Digital Teacher, Mr Bloor.

These students have been working with our Versa Roland Sign Maker to complete their own T-Shirts.   Once the designs have been completed (an example shown left0 the sign maker then produces the image that is pressed onto the t-shirt.

It allows the students to be creative making something that can be highly personalised combining images and photographs of the students into a collage, scene or theme.

The other work that students are completing is the transfer mug.   While we have produced the entire sticker/illustration in the past and then applied it to the mug with our hot press.  However we have made a pivot change with this that we have ordered the stickers from a third party which allowed us to to combine multi colours and also create a sticker that is more robust than we are able to produce with our current technology.

There are a number of examples of this work on our blog - you can use the search bar, top right, to look for our senior technology projects.    We typically tag our Year Seven and Year Eight projects with the 'DPE' tag-line. 

If you have any questions regarding our senior technology program you are more than welcome to contact us and we can put you directly in contact with the teachers responsible for this part of our curriculum program.

Paw Patrol - Not Really

 

We are looking for different ways to challenge our students with design ideas and creations.    One of the ways that we've done so is to take existing examples that are available online and look if we can develop our students skills and design techniques using tools such as Tinkercad.

An example of this process is to use the pre-made material from a popular children's show - Paw Patrol.  There are numerous examples that are online.  We've used a variety of sites for these kinds of files, in this case we're using Thingiverse.

We've found a large number of files and creations that follow this theme.   We selected several of them including badges and cookie cutters.   This has been quite a standard design for our students over the years.   You can use the search bar to locate them.  These prints had a variety of times to complete however they generally were in the forty minute range for prints and cost around the $1.00.  The cookie cutter below used 16g of PLA to complete the print.

Once these had been completed we then attempted to reverse the process - we started with the print (in this case the cookie cutter) and then attempted to create a design that is based on one of the characters, as shown above.

This student then used the 'scribble' icon/tool to create their own version of the design and coloured it.   Again the print times and the relevant PLA use and cost/price was under one dollar to produce the final print.

The student is going to refine this design to reflect more of the characteristics of the character and allow some feedback from the students.   They are going to look at the design, how it looks and work on improving the viability and the recognition of the design.

School Gift NZAIMS Games 2026

 

Challenge: To produce a unique gift for other schools when competing in a special event.

Background: This project has featured already a number of times.   In its original guise it was created by a then eight year old student as a 'filler' option to fill up some of the space created by Market Day 2025.

Based around the success of this print we also used a number of times as a gift or a token to other schools or educators or visitors to our school.    We are attending the 2026 NZAIMS Games in Tauranga as Auroa Primary School are competing in this years Girls Basketball Tournament.

For the purposes of the tournament we wanted something that would be both memorable and striking.   Our design of the cyclops which we are also making available can be seen here.

We have made the decision to take the original design which was 70mm across and increased it to 200mm across.

Resources used to complete the print: iPad, Tinkercad App, Bambu H2D, Glow-in-the-dark Filament: Bambu Brand.

Level of Difficulty: Low - this was originally completed by an eight year old student who worked independently on the design.   As we have described many times in the past this kind of basic activity is completed as an introductory tasks for students.

Size: The novelty print is oversized to create a 'talking point'.   By choosing to print as glow-in-the-dark filament the print had an extra layer of 'talking point'.    By choosing to do both although it had a slight increase in the price point it was not significant.

Cost/Price: To produce this unit the print uses 65g of filament to complete.  This has a price point of $1.31.  There was no waste plastic produced by this print.

Timeframe: To complete this print the H2D took two hours on the regular settings.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: Nil.

Roland Versa Signmaker: Enviro Group Signs

 

Recently Auroa Primary School has begun an overall of what is being created and carried out with regards to our environmental work.   

One of the key aspects of this is sorting the rubbish that is collected by the students at our school.  To this regard we wanted the students to be more actively sorting the waste material that they create.

While we were able to gain colour coded rubbish bins for this process one of the issues that we wanted to ensure was that the right waste would go into each bin.   To do that we turned to one of the pieces of technology at our school, the Roland Versa Sign Maker.   We have a dedicated sub-page to this machine and the way that we have used it on this blog, you can click on the link here or you can search in the search box on our blog and use the keywords 'sign maker'.

Each of the four bins has a different sticker which has been placed on the top of the bin but also the sides.  The design for the sticker was created by our middle school students - Year 5 and Year 6 students who are ten and eleven years old.   You can convert essentially any .PNG file into a sticker (and younger students can of course use apps such as Pic Collage as a creation tool) and then print it.

The stickers are durable, waterproof and have an extended shelf life.   We have used this machine to produce the decals for some of many major machines around Auroa School such as our Pinball Machines or Step Master Machine.

Starlink Aerial: Completed Project

Over the last few days we have been printing the component parts for a Starlink Aerial.    This was a project that was completed for a parent from school.  We did not design this piece of engineering we were able to locate it via Thingiverse.

This is one of a number of online sites with free share files, design and ideas.   While we occasionally select projects for engaging the students from a creative standpoint.    In this instance this design had a range of parts that linked together and locked into place - and while the eventual assembly of the final product requires some additional parts (screws, bolts) the part sits nicely at present and is able to interact with each part and clearly can be manipulated and turned into position.

The four parts of the print took a maximum of two hours (the base) and the other three parts that form the extended aerial part of the design took either one and a half or one hours so the total print time for the aerial is four and a half hours.   The print came in in terms of PLA cost at just under $8.00 to complete.