3D Printed Personalised Birthday Gift

 

Challenge: To produce a unique and personalised present from a student to another person.

Background: This was presented to the teacher as a completed project that had been designed, created and actioned at home by the student.   They wanted to combine a small stand, a name and row of hearts as well as a personalised message on the back of the design and give this as a gift.   The student concerned is eight years old.  There were two versions of this printed both on the P1S Bambu machines.   The first version is shown top left.

In this version the lettering was very narrow and subsequently the printer had difficulty in producing the desired affect, which was produced in the adjusted version.   The different between both versions size wise was only 30mm or so however it made the difference between a successful and non successful print.

In the initial print the lettering on the reverse of the design was too small and had difficulty being read, the revised version had 4mm high lettering that was sunk into the design and was as thin as 1mm in places but held its form.   

Resources used to complete this project: Tinkercad App, iPad, Bambu P1S, Cotton Candy PLA.

Level of Difficulty: Medium.  This student has shown creativity and flair when completing designs and had a very definite idea and process in mind when completing this print - also was very keen to make use of the exisiting 'cotton candy' as they felt that the colour would work in conjunction with the gift.

Size: The revised version of the print, as shown left, measured 110mm across was 30mm long and 40mm high.

Cost/Price: The print used 15g of PLA for rafting and 45g of PLA to complete the print.  This had a price point of $1.17 to complete the print.

Timeframe: This print took one and half hours to complete on the regular default, infill settings that are set up with the printing software.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: Nil - completed and done in a way that the student was very happy with.  There was a limited discussion about mounting it somewhere - or the fact that it does have a hole in the top left hand corner when facing forward, but the student did not want to change it.

Matariki and Puanga - AR/VR versions of the Art

 

As we have been detailing here on this blog we have a focus this week on an upcoming event of national significance - the Matariki Celebration (which is also Puanga in our geographic area).

As preparation for this we have been working on artwork that is based around using our 3D CAD design, our use of AR/VR tools and our ability to create physical objects (which in this case the final output is a piece of mixed media 3D Printing and art).   

As we have described and noted on this blog a number of times in recent years it is also possible to use Tinkercad as a tool to create an art project particularly when you cross the Tinkercad App with another App - a favourite of ours has been to do this with Pic Collage and the filters that are associated with this app are only becoming more inventive and unique with the onset of using AI as well.

The image shown left is an example of the final stage where we are heading.    This is showing the black background with the southern lights creating by using black paper, white paint and pastel crayons.

Onto this background we have used Tinkercad's ability to project its AR/VR and moved the virtual design into the physical space.   We still intend to print the design (and use glow-in-the-dark filament) but this shows our students and ourselves what the final design just might look like.   We have student who also have created a Matariki visual (in the above photograph) and used the text options in Tinkercad to name each of the stars.    We are now going to 3D Print the files for the art to then be layered on top of the art for the final design.    Print times vary but as we are only printing the lettering and the stars we do not anticipate it will be unreasonably long (or expensive)

3D Printed Pinball Prizes

 

Yesterday we celebrated the Smurfs win in the first 'tag team' Pinball tournament battle held here at Auroa School.  If you missed the livestream of this event you can locate it by clicking on the link here.

We also had the amazing Mr Bloor, whose must see Youtube channel is here use his creativity to produce a range of prizes for the students, from miniature versions of the competition pinball table to working pinball tables and a range of amazing items.

These were mentioned several times during the livestream and our champions were very spoilt!

If you wish to have further information about his amazing work please drop us a line and we can put you in contact with him

E-Sports - Virtual Pinball Battle 2026

Livestream of the Auroa Primary School 2026 Virtual Pinball Competition, filmed at Auroa Primary School on Monday 29th June 2026 - livestream of the finals,.

Auroa School Virtual Pinball Competition!

 

Its one of the highlights of the year! Its one of Auroa Schools Big Events - Tomorrow (New Zealand time) we are holding one of our e-sports Virtual Pinball Competitions! The students will be battling throughout the day to march towards the final!  You can follow the action by clicking on the link to the livestream which we will update you with shortly! In the meantime we've got this retrospective which has highlights of all of our major competitions throughout the year! 

3D Printed Crab Fidget Toy

 

Challenge: For student to create and print an original fidget toy.

Background: This is an original design piece from a former student in the classroom who is now nine years old.  In it she wanted to create a cartoon character that had humour in its features that also was constructed using linking - of particular note is the dimensions and details of this print.

This student has designed this print in their own time and presented it complete for printing.   They have designed the linking themselves based on a range of designs that they worked on last year.

Resources used to complete this project: iPad, Tinkercad App,  Bambu P1S, Cotton Candy PLA.

Level of Difficulty: High - this is a complex design by a creative middle school student (formerly junior school) who has created a range of designs and projects of an increasingly complex nature.  They are working independently to complete them.

Size: The print measures 110mm across.   The main body is 40mm high and the design was 10mm wide.

Cost/Price:  The unit used 5g of PLA for rafting and a further 16g of PLA to complete the print.  Thus a total of 21g of PLA was used for this project.   This had a price point of $0.41 to complete.

Timeframe:   The project took forty four minutes to complete which included a six minute warm up and thirty seven minute print time.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the student: The student is keen to test the linking to ensure that it can last and function as intended.  It is noted that the feet could have some additional development.

Bambu P1S vs Snapmaker 2026 Comparison

 

This print first appeared as an original challenge on this blog in September of last year before our School Market Day and came out of a physical challenge - that was combining an object (in this case the oversized single eye) with a 3D Print.   You can view this project by clicking on the link here.

While the design was adjusted a number of times by student concerned (who was seven at the time) the details remained relatively constant.   One of the things about this print that stood out, apart from the creativity was that it was an excellent example of junior innovation, particularly when it was modified to include additional storage space - and in an excellent example of working it is a great USB drive storage and sits well on a desk! It also had some variation where we printed a glow-in-the dark or super-glow-in-the-dark versions.

One of the aspects to it that was of question was the print time.   At the time we had a single Bambu H2D for printing and several older Snapmaker machines.   When printed on the Snapmakers the print had a completion time of two hours, it was the intention to try it again on the Bambu H2D or Bambu P1S and compare the times for the same print, and the quality of the print.

With a two hour timeframe in mind we repeated the print again.   Of a small side note we have used Tinkercad interface (classroom) for a number of years now the old profiles, accounts and material is still available for students to use hence we are using for this comparison print the original design.

The repeat print (shown left) completed this week has been printed with a similar quality.   The print cost from the project was $0.72c and the print used 35g of filament including some support/rafting for the parts of the piece that were not part of the main body (the circles on the design to show bumps).

There was clearly an expectation of a time reduction - as the original took two hours to complete and we estimated at the time the (top of the line) Bambu H2D would take about half that.    However using the P1S machine we were unsure of the timescale and how it might affect this print or other pints from the past.

The new version of this print was completed in a total of 57 minutes which included the standard six minute warm up for the machine and fifty one minutes for a total print time - meaning that the smaller Bambu machine was printing twice as efficiently.  This will lead us to revisit some of the students previous work which we either didn't print in larger numbers due to time constraints or issues with rafting or details.