Market Day - Packaging Examples

Challenge: To produce packaging to be used in relation to the 3D Prints for School Market Day.

Background: As the students are currently in the process of finishing their final designs for the 3D Printed aspects of their Market Day Projects some of the students who have created and designed their projects already are now focussing on producing the packaging of their projects.   

The mock up of the prints has to include a few compulsory aspects.  One is the print needs to be displayed.  We have a commercial grade laser cutter on site (which will be featured in a post shortly).   As a consequence of this we have a number of 'off cuts' that is prints that haven't worked as intended which are available to the students as scrap.   The students from our class have located a number of these and are using them for the base to hold their designs.    While the MDF is currently an off white we have discussed the students painting the base or using dye to change the colour.

Problem solving with juniors has involved working out ways to secure the prints to the wood.   In the case of use the Roland Sticker Machine it produces an adhesive label that is shiny but also very smooth - the and the prints when sitting on them tend to slide off.  While they can be held in place by ribbon or string this is not fool-proof and tends to require careful management.   One of the potential solutions and one we are using in our classroom is to apply a small amount of blue tack under key parts of the prints, which are not typically visible to the potentially purchaser but make it much more secure to the base.

Prior to using the Roland Sticker Machine the students are experimenting with composition and also looking at practical examples of how the items that they are selling might look.

In the example of the Fennec Fox shown left the student needs to consider that the lettering or design font maybe obscured by the placement of a print on top of the labelling.   In this case the student has used  Brandcrowd to create their design although other students in the classroom have also used logomaker for the same purpose.

The students working on all of these projects are Y3 and Y4 students in New Zealand, so students who are eight and nine working on 3D Printing for the first time in most cases in the classroom.

Again with the rabbit which has previously featured on this blog the student is looking at ways to enhance the presentation - when the object is placed on the MDF and the composition looked at and the student then needs to consider the backing.

One of the other aspects of the print is the QR code designed by the students linking to additional information and work.  For students who have already completed and designed the print this allows them to continue working on the project while other students are looking at completing their designs and testing them.