3D Printed Adapted Fidget Toy

 

Challenge: Student have been present at a local craft market and had seen a stall where one of the products was a 3D Printed Octopus.   The student felt that they recognised the form and the shape from our school Market Day in 2026 and they wanted to produce their own version, with some additional personalisation.  The design was priced at $10.00 for the market.

Background: The student was indeed correct as observant and regular visitors to the site will recognise one of the Market Day Business from 2025 which was Ollie the Octopus.

When the student discussed it with the teacher while the file itself was easily able to be located as a publicly available .stl file the teacher spoke to the student about providing some individual change to the figure or the design to personalise it.

That came in the form of the student using the main Tinkercad interface to introduce both a crown and also their name in large lettering on the back of the design.

Size: Each of the legs are 50mm long.  The main body of the octopus was 60mm high and 50mm across.  The crown was an additional 10mm high at the top of the design.

Cost/Price: The print used 46g of regular PLA to complete the print.  There was a small amount of rafting between each of the joins of the linking on the legs of the design, which allows it to shimmer.

This gave the unit a price point of $0.93c to complete.  As noted in the introduction the price point for this item at the market was $10.00.

Timeframe: To complete this print the design took two hours and forty five minutes.   

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: The name of the student in the form of the lettering came out from the design (as shown left).  Normally we encourage students to sink the lettering into the design so there is no chance, particularly on rounded sides of the design for any of the lettering to break off.

The student was extremely happy with the outcome so there is no further adaptions required or intended for this project.