3D Printed Key: 2025 Junior Exemplar

 

Challenge: To produce an original piece of work as a gift suitable for another school to use in some way.

Background: We have been wanting to look at working with another school on collaborative projects and including design that could be unique and something special for another school.

As we noted previously we looked at working with another ADS (Apple Distinguished School) from Auckland, New Zealand, The Gardens School.

We had the students create a range of ideas based around the logo of the school - the challenge for the students was to create something featuring the Gardens School logo.   As detailed our students worked in various dimensions of Tinkercad to produce the logo.    We stressed to the students the importance of accurately depicting the logo as closely to the original.  Various versions of the design were attempted by the students and then we used AR/VR to project the ideas around the school at different locations.   This tested the viability of the design.

The colour matching that was available for the project came in the form of the main interface of Tinkercad.  The student relied on scribble from Tinkercad to provide the koru detail.

Level of Difficulty: High - the detail in this project need to be particularly careful and respectful of the logo and its importance to another school, creating something that was not considered close was something that we steered the students away from creation.  This was always intended to be a project where we would have a narrow number of final products eventually 3D Printed.  While this student is a Y4 student (eight year old) they have been constantly creating a high degree of designs throughout the year.

Size: This is something of an oversized keyring as the project currently measures 100mm by 100mm.   The print has an outer rim which is 10mm high on the outside, and 5mm on the inside - this creates a layering affect with the design which is eye catching.   The font is faithful to the original being two regular fonts with the 'Gardens' part of the logo again relying on the student using scribble to create.  This is designed as an oversized keyring for teachers with teachers specifically in mind.  For it to be more practical the project would need to have been reduced in size as it is not intended to be put into a regular pocket.

Cost/Price: Using the reliable feature on the Bambu H2D with regular prices for PLA which we are currently experiencing at $30.00 NZD for a 1kg spool of filament this print requires 36g of filament to complete and this would have an associated cost of $0.90c to complete.   For a full regular roll we would be able to produce 27 units on regular settings and infill.  There is no waste PLA with this print - that is it prints as shown directly onto the plate without the need for any waste plastic support.

Timeframe: Using the Bambu H2D this print takes just over sixty minutes.  Given the detail with the lettering this would be the best potential result for the machine to complete successfully.

What we would do differently/Next Steps for the students: This is not a project for our own students it is very much intended to be something for the students to do for someone else, and therefore judging its success is very much dependant on others opinions of the final product.

If you use the search bar top right and use the tag 'Keyring' you will see a multitude of projects with this theme.