Market Day Exemplars: Flexi-Trees

Challenge: Using creativity, innovation and personalisation students from a Y3/4 classroom create a unique product for our school market day.

Background: This group had a number of students who operated towards a common goal.   While they initially had a focus on candles the revision of the key areas for development meant that the students also looked into flexi-animals (initially) before pivoting to Christmas trees as the form of decoration as the connection between that and they felt would make a better point of sale due to the time of the year.   The student who drove this group also decided early on with consultation with the teacher to make an attempt to develop the ability to create a flexi-animal or a flexi-toy.   These are available at length online but the student wanted to undertake the process herself from start to finish and develop her CAD and design skills to master it.

This process has been completed before by several students who have now graduated the school however we also had these students create original 'flipped' video content which the students were able to use to create the linking that was required.   This journey has been documented in depth on this blog during the course of the year, starting with this initial post that was made in May.  During the course of the year the student was able to produce many prototypes to complete the project - you can locate this by using the tag 'flexi animals 2025' in the search bar or clicking on examples like the one here.

In addition to this the group also decided that others wanted to create candles and that finally another student who could not master the linking in time for the Market Day wanted to produce a range of key rings instead that could be used and sold as stock filler items at the Market Day.

Level of Difficulty: High - a number of students have attempted to complete the process this year, this is the first student, or group of students to do so successfully.  The linking can be produced automatically now as a feature of Bambu studio but there are a number of design steps that need to be completed to be successful.   With regards to the badges the student who produced these was capable of doing so easily and has shown a good level of confidence and design with using Tinkercad so it was very much in her wheelhouse.  As we have noted numerous times on this blog the students involved in these activities are seven and eight year old students who have been using Tinkercad for either one or two years.

Size: The prints (trees) were featured in detail on this blog in a seperate post - they measured 120mm long were 100mm wide and 10mm thick.  The badges were also identified as excellent 'stock filler' and were featured in a post that can be located here.  They were 70mm by 40mm and were 10mm wide.

Cost/Price: The trees were settled price wise at $3.00 each and had a production point of either $0.80 NZD or $0.90 NZD for glow-in-the-dark filament.  As we sold (out) of the trees at a $3.00 price we made a profit per unit of either $2.20 or $2.10.   For the badges we sold them at $2.00 NZD and they cost $0.40c for filament giving a return of $1.60 per unit.

Timeframe: We used the Bambu H2D to print the trees, each of which took just under or just over one hour (it depending on the lettering as each was personalised or individualised and had a message or name sunk into the design of it.   We did attempt to complete them on the Snapmaker machines however it was clear that the Bambu had superior finishing which was expected given the age of the machine.

The badges also took one hour although these were completed on a seperate machine and generally prints in this case are running at twice the time of the other.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: The student is now returning to the original design idea and applying the linking that she has developed to animals to complete the process started early in the year.