The 2022 has seen another school year start in New Zealand and a new group of students have arrived in the classroom. In our room we have a new collection of students. While this is a little repetitive for regular viewers or visitors of this blog we have something of a tradition where we allow students to produce one individual piece of 3D Printing.
Our default for this is a standard badge or a keyring with the template produced via a video that we have featured on this blog. There are a couple of basics related to our hardware. We have a classroom printer which is an Ultimaker 2+ which was reconditioned four years ago. It has been set with a 6mm nozzle and we are using 'Sun' branded PLA. The students again this year are Y5/6 students from New Zealand which makes them between nine and eleven years old. At this age level we have consistently found that the students can use Tinkercad to produce perfectly serviceable prints.
Tinkercad is in our opinion a perfectly serviceable app/web based browser that allows students to create designs for 3D Printing. They are typically able to pick it up within a few minutes and the design features are easily manipulated. In recent years they have developed some of the options to include circuits, coding and virtual reality (for the app) to further add dimensions to the program. Its also free and teachers can set up an entire classroom of students in only a few minutes.
We have detailed this type of print extensively in the past, and you can view some of the initial basic print ideas that we have
produced in the past here.
We are again using this as a launching platform to get the students interested in design and working to use the printer as a creative tool - and we will be following and posting some of the ideas and work again on this blog this year.
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