3D Printing Week One in the Classroom

What happened in Week One of Auroa Primary School for 2026 in regards to Digital Design:

To complete work in the first week of school students used their iPads and accessed the Tinkercad website to log into their online design accounts, used the Tinkercad software and created their first designs.

Currently we have not used the Tinkercad app or completed any AR/VR work.

Cohort One: This is the new group of students to the classroom who have had no previous experience with using Tinkercad. They are eight year olds who are developing and exploring their use of Tinkercad for the first time this year. They have a regular iPad to create all of their designs. One of the students has access to their own 3D Printer however they are using it more for printing pre-made items rather than original design at this stage.

We were able to assess their efforts by using the Tinkercad Classroom Interface.   An effort was made to print as many of these initial designs as possible to give the students a physically created print to think about and have as an output.    As non of the prints were sized to take more than one hour (on the Bambu H2D) and there were 15 students in this group this was achievable.

Cohort Two: Students (eight years old) who used Tinkercad for one year.   These students had grasped many of the principals and ideas and used Tinkercad actively for some time.   For these students we allowed them to tutor or help the other students on the first day and on the second day start the rebuild of the toy farmhouse to replace the doors etc.   They were measuring, designing, checking and then problem solving to think about a hinge and how the door might be able to be swung open.  For the purpose of sizing the students used some examples of the name badges. We are hoping that this will lead to the sharing of ideas with the other group of students once they have completed designs. It is our intention to complete another seperate lesson next week for both groups before combing challenges from this point forward as all the students will have the fundamental design skills that are required to start working on projects. Next week we want to focus on the 'stencil' idea from last year as we want the students to master the concept of using 'hole' to insert and modify basic shapes.