Market Day 2025: Junior Development of Ideas

This year we have one of our major school events - our school market day.   This year we are having a longer build to the project and the students are spending ten weeks prototyping and designing their ideas with a focus on innovation and personalisation, two key things which we are always looking for to highlight with our students work.

Our junior class of students with our eight and nine year olds have been typically using Tinkercad and 3D Printed designs for the past two years.

In this example show left the students have now spent two weeks (afternoons for an hour) thinking about designs and creations.    They started with a Minecraft theme as it was a game that they all played regularly and enjoyed significantly.

By using their technology we were able to locate a series of examples that the students felt were featured in the game.    By located these they then started to see what 3D Prints that they could locate that represented them, focussing on public domain sites that had freely available .stl files that they could convert and adapt (size, and personalise them where potentially appropriate).

The various combinations were then 'staged' by the students as shown left.   The idea came for a version of a night light, or some form of illumination and as these discussions developed the students looked at the potential to name, or personalise the display.   The swords that are featured in the print were an obvious location and the students looked at the concept and the ideas around including a 'name' block (similar to the Minecraft font/heading) with the name of the person between the two Minecraft labels.

The final part of the initial design was for students to think about a base and storage.   In the second photograph you can see that the initial base was circular and relatively flat.  While this was initially used, the students quickly picked up the idea of creating some height to go with it to allow it to have more of a display presence.    The senior school students have several templates available for use with the school laser cutter.    We took one of these examples and combined it with our design, the idea being it could potentially used to house the lighting.  We have located a set of fairy lights that could work in conjunction with the set up.   The slot in the box is used to access it when it is in position.   The idea is to place the box underneath the design to raise it, then have the circular design placed on top and then the additional features to be mounted (most likely via a glue gun) the entire project will be set up in various designs until the students feel that it able to be prototyped.  At this stage all of the features of the design are able to be printed in under an hour.