School Market Day Ideas - 2025 Overview

Every second year at Auroa Primary School we have a major School event, our School Market Day.  On this day students run businesses with a focus on invocation, creativity and personalisation and we have the local community come to school for the event to purchase items and see what our students have created.   This is a major undertaking for the school.   This slideshow is an updated selection of ideas that the students were involved in creating (from seven to twelve years of age) using iPads and Tinkercad, Mac Books and Sketchup (for laser cutting).   We have also included Sonic Vision Studios amazing summary videos of the events.

We are looking forward to being back at School at the end of January with our new classroom of students with new designs, creations and projects.

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.

2025: Year in Review - Dolls House Project

 

In February 2025 we started with one of our long term projects for the year, when we attempted to use our technology to repurpose a Dolls House.

This item was scheduled scheduled to be sent to landfill and we set about using the schools technology, the 3D Printers and the Laser Cutter to see if we could revive the item and make it into a useable item.   While the seniors concentrated on using the laser cutter to replace the panels and the wood base for the item the juniors from our class spent time designing 3D Printed furniture that could be placed inside the Dolls House.

This proved to be an excellent hands on task for the students from our classroom.  They were able to use their iPads and the Tinkercad App to design and create a range of items that could fit into the dolls house and be used as furniture.

The students used various figures to complete some basic proto-typing (shown left) and then created furniture that fitted in with these figures, which was then applied to the Dolls House.

We used Tinkercads AR/VR feature extensively as we were creating the designs and then projecting them into place in the house to see how they would fit, what adjustments needed to be made and how we could develop the designs further.

Further designs and creations followed including some practical problem solving from the students (for instance in the early examples the base of the 3D prints tended to have stump bases as the students found in regular examples however this meant the designs would be weak at this point so they opted to instead produce block finishes to the designs.

Students spent several months refining each design, testing its viability and ensuring that they were challenging themselves by more complex designs and features for the build.

We eventually developed a range of exemplars for furniture that met the brief, that had an element of size that would work with the house and the figures that we had been using.

At the same time the seniors had opted for a complete rebuild of the Dolls House when structural concerns were raised about the MDF base.   This involved extensive laser cut work as the project was started again from scratch.

This also meant that the furniture that our juniors had designed was in turn placed into a different location than had been replaced and some adjustments were required to ensure that they met the purpose they were intended for.  We also investigated using the Roland Versa Sign Maker to produce potential decals for both the walls and the floors of the design.

By October the project was reaching its conclusion - at this point we had the Dolls House fully completed, and the furniture had also been completed and detailed.  We had our major fundraising event for the school year, our 2025 Market Day where the Dolls House became one of the major auction items which was auctioned to raise money for the school.

This was done safe in the knowledge that the files for the production of another Dolls House were on file and easily accessible at the point that we wanted to print another one.

It ended up being a practical task that combined two different levels of work at our school and combined the use of two significant technologies.   We used our iPads and the Tinkercad App for the furniture design and AR/VR and our Mac Books and Sketch-up for the Laser Cutting design and creation.

The slideshow below details the entire process.   Thank you for your visit - this site has now closed for the year, we are rebuilding it in the background and we will be moving onto new projects in February 2026.

2025: Goodbye from 3D Print School

 

The Year in Review: Sonic Vision Studio Movies

Its nearly the end of the year in New Zealand and the end of the 2025 School Year has occurred.  We are back in February 2026.   

There are some projects happening in the background.  One example of this is our amazing AV teacher, Mr Bloor who is currently working on preproduction for another one of his fantastic movies.

These movies are major events for our school involving a cast of students and staff and amazing work from Sonic Video Studios.   You can click on the link to Youtube page here.

When the movie is completed we will be having another Drive in Movie Night were we have the community come to our school.   You can see the 2023 Drive in Movie highlights here:

There are two amazingly epic videos that Mr Bloor has now included on his youtube page.   They are huge events and a fantastic amount of work, we are so proud of our wonderful Mr Bloor.   The first is 'The Fast and the Furious: Undercover Student' - this was the Drive in Movie from 2021.  This was created as a family movie for our local school community.

The second epic move is the 2023 'Ella vs. The Space Invaders' from 2023.   This was another huge effort from the staff and students at Auroa Primary School and a great event for the local community.  It is designed to be for students from five to thirteen years of age and was the movie presented to our community at the 2023 Drive in Movie Night!

If you would like anymore details about the production, creation and event involved in this movie please drop us a line and we can assist you or put you in contact with Mr Bloor.