2025 - Year in Review Involving Minecraft in 3D Printing and CAD Design

 

Our class of students is junior and has some amazing students in the classroom.   One of their favourite learning activities and programmes to use is Minecraft (in classroom of course, Minecraft Education).   During the course of this year we used the combination or similarities between Minecraft and Tinkercad for a range of learning activities that the students were involved with.

The main Tinkercad interface has a range of design tools which include all of the main geometric shapes.  This works in very well in designing the corresponding Minecraft items or animals as they can be replicated accurately and the students have a knowledge about them.   You can see an example of this progress from the screenshot top left when one of the junior school students (who was eight years old) was able to use the Tinkercad program and their iPad to replicate the Minecraft Panda.  You can view an extended description of the process by clicking on the link here from September 2025.

Once we had completed the first wave of these designs we then challenged students to create more depth, more details and add to the process.   The first round of prints tended to be things like creepers and bees which you can view here. 

Further more detailed examples followed such as the Panda shown left (which was then duplicated to show a second Panda, which is a copy of the first).   The student used Tinkercad to design the shape and added the details, then used the colour palette to match with the black and white theme.   This was one of the few designs from this run that we turned into a full 3D Print.  Given the time of the year and other commitments that students had at the time this was always going to be a 'virtual' project as opposed to a 3D printing project.   You can read the full details of this project here.

It goes without saying that for regular visitors to this blog our major school event this year was the 2025 School Market Day.   During this event when we were working through the design and creation process Minecraft and Minecraft accessories featured heavily in the planning process.  Our students found that there was a very significant amount of material online from free domain sites that we have used to source .stl files (such as Thingiverse).

Of our eight class groups one of them was specifically focussed on Minecraft and utilised glow-in-the-dark filament to use in combination with LED lights as described in details in this exemplar post.

We also used Minecraft educations design tool to create our Market Day items - so using Minecraft to create a scale model of a Tinkercad design.  In this instance here we recreated our students model of the iPad stand that was the major item for one of the market day groups.

This allowed the students in a group of four to team build the item and design it as a copy,   You can click on the link here to view this post from November.

Thank you for your visit to this site - as we have stated previously we are currently on our summer break with our New Zealand students and will be returning to the classroom in February 2026 when we will start actively posting with new material.

We also used Minecraft and Minecraft creatures or animals as a basis for a general 3D Printing design.

We made designs such as our original Dolphin which became a keyring which we marketed for Market Day 2025.   This design was further developed with storage ideas based around the design such as the example shown left or a further recent example shown on a previous post here on this blog.