3D Printing Christmas Cracker Challenge

 

Challenge: To produce the 'item' that you might find in a regular Christmas cracker.

Background: This challenge was based around the concept of the students developing something that by its nature needed to be small.  The item needed to fit inside a cracker to meet the success criteria to be printed - if it was too big too fit in, it was 'out'.

This really refined the students designs as early in the process the students typically went too big and when they then adjusted the size to meet the criteria the purpose could be lost.  To ensure that it was correct I purchased a small amount of crackers from the dollar store, this gave the students more spatial awareness of what they were dealing with and how they were also challenged.

An early example came left in the form of this tree.   

Level of Difficulty: Low - this was a whole class activity and a range of responses were expected while some would clearly hit the mark easily the restrictions on size caused a challenge that some students really found more challenging than they should have.

Size: The tree measured 50mm high, was 30mm wide and was 10mm deep.  It was designed as a ornament to hang on the tree, although there was a hole in the star that was supposed to allow a thread to be passed through it to allow it to be tied.  This hole was too small for this purpose so it had to be sent back to be redesigned.

Cost/Price:

The dimensions of this print meant it used 4g of PLA and had a cost of $0.10 NZD.

It is one of the selections of 3D Prints that the students designed that looked fantastic as a Tinkercad design, looked wonderful when AR/VR around the classroom and in position as a tree but possibly lost something in the translation of becoming a print.  It would be possible to make this multiple colours potentially.

Timeframe: 17 minutes this was a situation where the machine warming up, starting the process and preparing to print took longer than the print itself.

What we would do differently/Next Steps for the Students: The student met the brief however there are adjustments that are required - the connection to the way to hang the decoration at the top of the tree being the most obvious.   The print would be a great example of something that could be used for a bunting etc as its size and time frame means the potential of the printing could be completed en masse.