3D Pritned Junior Progressions Summary - Badge

 

The classroom this year consists of students who are a mix of Y3 and Y4 in New Zealand, that is students who are seven and eight years old.   The eight year olds have the experience of being in the classroom for a calendar year and have used Tinkercad to design and make the 3D Projects that are featured on this blog.

Blending in the new designs is something like this design shown left, which has a basic shape and lettering.   Twenty minutes to print, student designed it independently (we have four 3D printers as school so I do need to be mindful of other classrooms and what is being designed and printed.

An extension task following on for this is something like adding additional features and working out how to insert a hole into the design to create a way to tie the design to an object.  The students typically experiment with getting the size correct, typically starting with something simple as shown left, which was developed by a new student this year for his second actual print.   Dimensions were worked on by the student, including measuring it up.

Furthermore we then look at adding an object into the design - there is a full range of objects that can easily be added from the main design page, in this case it is a rugby ball.   Students experiment with the depth of the objects and lettering, typically when they start both tend to be extending out from the design to a point that they compromise the design itself.  In this progression shown left the student has the lettering coming out 3mm from the design and the ball a similar length.  This print measured 100mm long was 60mm high and was 5mm thick with the default settings on the print this took just over three hours.

Another second tier design is shown left, this by a second year student, who has developed his skills during the past twelve months.   As an eight year old in under ten minutes the student is able to design a label from scratch, attach a name to it and two additional images to go with it.

The student was able to present this design for printing, without any input from the teacher, based on his design experience last year.

The final challenge at this stage with the more experienced students and the students who are designing for the first time but excelling was to look at inverting the writing so instead of it featuring on the outside of the design it instead was on the inside but sunk into the design.

The students designing this kind of item can be reassured that the item has a significant shelf life.  The earliest prints from ten years ago, when we first started printing are still in existence as has been evidenced by our outside print.

We have also used a box of inspiration featuring some old projects and while students are waiting for their initial designs to print, we have utilised Tinkercads AR/VR feature to image their creations.

You can see ten years of examples on this site by using the search bar on the right hand side as we have tagged 'badges' 'labels' and 'exemplars'.