Senior Student: Practical Craft Market Experience

 

One of our most popular series of prints in recent years from both the students perspective and feedback from visitors at our school has been the set of flexi-animals created by a senior student.

This students saw similar examples online and was able to deconstruct the process by identifying the flexi-linking, by using Tinkercad (following some tutorials from Youtube) 

The student has talked in the past about the potential to run a stall at the local market.  Our school has made this possible by making the 3D Printers available and allowed the student to use the machines at the cost of the PLA to produce the prints.   The student is then going to sell these prints (which it should be pointed out she has designed from scratch including making a set of originals) to the general public to see if she can run a small niche business.

The student concerned had a significant number of potential prints available.  However for the market process which she is going through she has settled on four designs for the first market print run.

She choose the Kiwi the symbol of New Zealand as it is a unique and iconic symbol and one of the designs that has received significant feedback.  Details of this print can be located here.

Another practical print with a clear use was the counting caterpillars.   These were commissioned by the junior part of our school who wanted unique counters to assist the students in counting by producing flexible number lines.   The design was initially created here using a slug as the basis before evolving in the caterpillar design.  You can click on the hyperlinks to find out more details about the prints described.

For the final two designs she has opted for the butterfly and dolphin.   Both of these designs have been remodelled since their initial appearances here on this blog.   The butterfly was one of the first complicated prints that the student linked and worked on.  It was this design that was discovered to also work as a floating toy in the school swimming pool.

This project eventually morphed into an excellent series of lessons culminating in a series of creations from the junior school now producing their own versions of these prints.  We intend to update the progress of this process (ie the market selling of these items) once it is complete.  We have previously held a market day at our school where one of the businesses was based on flexi-animals (although these were by and large not produced by the students instead coming from sites like Thingiverse.