3D Printed Projects: Market Day 2025

 

We are looking at ways for students to think about how they can adapt designs for our 2025 School Market Day with the two key components that we are looking for - innovation and personalisation.

In an example shown left the NBA logo and badge was printed out (by a student) with a design that was available as an .stl file on a free website.    

This led to the question being posed how it could be personalised or localised and the result was the student developed a version for his local rugby club based on the design.    Each of the prints took approximately two hours to print and the larger print was 140mm square, the Coastal Rugby was 100 square.   We are encouraging the student concerned to consider how they could add detail (such as develop the rugby ball part of the design, thing about the font and how it looks) and improve its presentation.  We have created versions of this print on many occasions such as this oversized keyring from 2019 or these versions which featured on this blog in 2018.     We also know from experience that these prints have an extremely long life as a working print (as opposed to an MDF type keyring) as evidenced by our update from this year when we identified after seven years of daily use the 3D Print was still maintaining its shape and form.

Another of our groups is looking at necklaces and jewellery as a product.  Again we want to pose the question to the students - where is the innovation how can the print be personalised?

In this instance the student wanted to make a series of message beads that is items that could be linked together that spelt out a unique name.   The student took a regular shape from Tinkercad introduced a letter and additional shapes on it (which used the Tinkercad draw feature) and then hollowed each one out so it could be used and strung together.   The student is now experimenting with the different ways to decorate the top of the beads and also look at what the size that best fits the purpose of.   The example shown show shapes that are 20mm by 20mm.   There is also a range of options that are created for this by different use of filament.

We have spoken how flexi-animals or variations of them have proven to be some of the most enduring ideas and prints that have been created by our students.

We have had previously students create significant media and material related to the process who have moved onto higher schooling - however we asked these students to create unique tutorials to document the process using the 'flipped learning' pedagogy and it was this material that has been used by our students in 2025 to create a range of original designs. 

We have a range of students completing designs in this area - one such example shown above has been a student who is looking to create some form of pendants or jewellery with a star as the basis, and is currently working on her linking.