3D Printed Christmas Decorations - 2023

 Each year as a final project for the students we like to engage them by looking at designing Christmas Themed Ornaments that can be created and hung from a tree.   This is a common subject that the students can relate to, have experience with practical examples and it allows some customisation and individualisation of gifts and prints.     Again we have a sequence in place - using the main Tinkercad interface to look at design creation.

The size of the design varies - when we give the classroom of Y3/4 students a free design opportunity they tend to use the scribble command or the basic shapes that are from the main interface.   We print the first few runs of designs and then allow the students to look at their creations and refine, design and modify.

Students who have shown an aptitude or design class in the past we tend to push to come up with more complex designs.

In this instance shown left the print measures 50mm across and is 70mm high.  It is 5mm thick - the student has attempted a 'snowman' type design (interesting fact in our part of New Zealand it does not snow in Winter - we have Christmas at in summertime).

The student will refine and improve this design moving forward and we look to challenge her to increase the degree of difficulty.  The print took just over an hour to print on the default settings (including an infill inside the print of 15%).    We have been asked recently for the .stl files to be available for various prints - as we have stated in the past on this blog these files are the individual creations of the students from our school.    They are intended as ideas for educators and students to create their own individual 3D Printed designs.   If you have a particular interest in a file you can potentially email the teacher (myles.webb@gmail.com) and I can make it available,

Finally as this blog has been running now for nearly ten years (!) we have a large amount of material available from previous years Christmas themed prints.   You can search the entire blog using the search function on the left or look at the links below which reflect some particular work from previous years:

• Our 2022 Summary of past years and details about a variety of prints.
• In 2018 we complete prints in two classrooms for each student some 60 in total some of the details and a selection of the prints are featured here.
• In 2016 we used Glow-In-The-Dark filament for something different and effective
• in 2016 we created specific present labels for individuals presents.
• In 2018 we saw some of our most creative Christmas Prints when a student spent a considerable time locating, designing and refining a Christmas Sleigh using Tinkercads main interface.