3D Printing Lore - Juniors can 3D Print

 

We've been creating a set of teaching points to consider relating to challenging the thinking of teachers and educators with the use or application at a regular state school.

Previously we've already stated three:

#1 You don't need more than one machine to 3D print with your students at school.  This year we are anticipating using a single machine for our classroom and the majority of the 3D Printing work at our school.

#2 You don't need to 3D print all of your 3D printing projects.  We again this year will be creating and designing a number of projects but not all of them will make it to the printing stage - a number will be published as AR/VR images and other designs.

#3 3D Printing Glow in the Dark - changing filament to a different kind of printing is increasingly simple and adds dimensions, texture and a different aspect to the students designs.

#4 Juniors Can 3D Print.  This blog has gone through several stages of development, starting with its initial years the designs and creations were completed by senior students.   Since 2022 the prints, designs and creations on this site have been generally created by students who are seven and eight years old.

One of the biggest misconceptions that is currently met by many teachers is that 3D Printing is for seniors (older students) and not something that juniors are capable of or necessarily have the skills to complete, which was very much my own line of thinking when I changed classroom levels to the junior school - nothing could be further from the truth.   Students have consistently and constantly shown great aptitude to use Tinkercad to develop and plan, adapt and create a wide range of projects for the most part completely independently of the teacher.

A case in point which we are highlighting now is the 'cyclops' storage print which came as a result of introducing the 'eyes' sticker sheet shown above to the students.   When given to the students as a challenge the idea was to produce a character using an eye as the starting point.

Students in the classroom produced a range of ideas and one of the seven year old students created the design featured on this page.  They did so independently of the teacher, with the exception of the 'eye'.   The concept, the idea, the design and process was all completed by the student who then in turn handed the final .stl file to the teacher for the teacher to print.  There was no input or guidance and was completed by a student in their first year using Tinkercad.

The design took just over one hour to print, details of the full process and how it modified over time can be seen on this post here, followed by the final design which is described here.