3D Printing Term Four in New Zealand

 

In New Zealand the final school term of the year has started, with a finish time of early December for most schools.  At our school we are starting to wind up the year with various projects.

One of the lessons that we have learned over the year, particularly when looking to have a class set of anything completed, when we are running on a school set of printers, is to start early.   Hence we have started looking at Christmas themed decorations again and focussing on smaller designs that can be mass produced easily by the printers at school.

Firstly we have tasked the students with looking at a typical decoration that might hang from a Christmas Tree.   The criteria for this is something that the students might design, have some level of personalisation on it and have elements that the students have created.   We have inserted this requirement because some of the students using Tinkercad were aware that they would be able to use a design tool like the search bar and locate an element like the snowflake shown below.   

This by itself can be printed directly, but the student in this case has opted to introduce their name to a bar and link that with a ring to allow the design to easily be hung from a tree.

We are also looking at creating labels such as the one shown in the photograph above.  In this example the student has taken their name, used a basic text design and added a linking ring.  This student was a Y3 who is using Tinkercad for the first time and was able to do this independently.   They add to add some blocks into the design to ensure that everything was linked (in the example between the capital A and the o you can see it in the bottom right hand corner of the A.

These labels are 60mm by 25mm and 10mm thick and currently taking just over 45 minutes to print.   We are currently using a 'marble' filament which has produced the affect shown.

There are many, many examples of Christmas Decorations from the last few years on this site, you can locate them by using the search bar icon or clicking on this summary post.   We also have examples of the labelling