2025 - Review of Tinkercad Vs. Pic Collage

 

One of the most powerful aspects of using 3D Design and CAD design has been the students ability to combine their creations with other Apps to increase their purpose, design and depth.

In the previous year we've used a combination of apps with the students iPads particularly when we've been working on something that hasn't meant that the 3D Printing part of the project has been easily printable or machines have not been readily available.  You can see examples from previous years of our students using Pic Collage on 'Farm Scenes' created in Tinkercad or using both Pic Collage and Pixton Comic Maker to create an explanation of how our students 3D Printed boats were created. or further examples here from 2024.

In these situations the students are using all of the design skills and creation that their iPads and the Tinkercad App provides but the final output is not necessarily a 3D Print.

We used a range of tasks to complete these - in examples this year we used the 'festive' AR masks with Pic Collage to create a series of festive images.   For example the figure shown left is the final version of a Tinkercad Creation that then had been projected into the classroom to create a interesting background and then had the filter applied to the final image.

This was then converted by the student into the front page for a unique Christmas card.  While this might seem to be a somewhat complicated process the entire task was completed independently by an eight year old student in the course of an afternoon (one hour session) who had their iPad, the two apps and understood the process.   You can see the full details of this task from this blog in November by clicking on the link here.

There are further examples of the overall process which you can access by using the search bar in the top right hand corner of this bar.  We have tag every print and project over the last tern years with various tags and links, so you can find a number of examples and also see the progression of the students work and ideas.   We thank you for your visit to this page - we are not currently at school as we are returning with a newly revamped site and some significant changes as we are on a journey, to the new year in February 2026.

Pic Collage have a range of filters that can be applied to designs - we have a basic subscription to the app at school and typically have a limited number of filters available, however there are a number of apps that offer the same basic idea that they take an image (which of course in this case is an original students design) and then apply additional details, features and depth to the image, the duration of which usually takes no more than a few seconds, such as this other example of a basic scribble design from November 2025.