Holiday Break: October 2026

For those of you who are unfamiliar with our location, we are located in rural New Zealand at the wonderful Auroa, South Taranaki.   We have great location, this photograph was taken today at lunchtime outside our school looking towards the maunga/mountain that dominates our landscape, Mount Taranaki.

Our students are currently on the second week of their two week break between terms three and four of 2026.  We will be back posting next week with our regular contributions.

In the meantime we are looking at a range of posts from last term that our students were working on. 

As we've mentioned in a post last week as such we don't have a massive seasonal celebration at the moment, and our friends in the USA obviously have a large volume of material themed around celebrations later this month.

We are printing a small selection of material primarily to encourage 'thinking' and design about it from students with this theme, including some of our Pumpkin AR/VR work from the end of term.

This design was located online and has a diameter of 50mm.   It is 30mm high.  It has used 22g of PLA to complete the print and has a price point of $0.45c.

While it would not suit a candle due to it being PLA printed it would potentially benefit from having an LED light inside of it.    Free .STL files such as this one are available in significant numbers and can be easily accessed for printing purposes.   We usually print a small number of such items where appropriate and ask students to consider or think about them.

Using Tinkercad as an AR/VR Tool

 

We've posted about our favourite app that our students use with their iPads to develop design skills using Tinkercad as a projection AR/VR tool.

In this example shown left we've taken a basic design.  As somewhat of an aside at our school due to our rural location we don't typically celebrate this event, although there are a wealth of designs that are available about this theme. 

In this example we had a short window of time available to students to complete a design and have some creative licence with it.   It was not intended as a 3D Print project although we would conceivable do so if the right circumstance was completed - we were looking as original projects developed by the students that would make a viable print.

This activity was completed by eight year olds working with their iPads independently.   The design of the pumpkin was located online, the students modified them by adding the lettering above and then located places around the school where they could project the pumpkin.   They deliberately choose to build the designs as large as possible and choose a location where the background had objects that would automatically size the objects, 

In the first instances the students used the school courts, swimming pool and buildings.   The instructions from the screenshot are from the Tinkercad app.   The students then repeated the process at a second location, which was on the courts.   The Netball Court/Basketball court and its fence was the sizing (as was the bus) which again allowed the student to show the size of the AR/VR that they had created.

The final part of the display process was to take the students images and then apply them through a AR/VR image filter.  In this case as we have done in the past we used Pic Collage to take the image and modify it.   You can see the contrast between the two images the image above and the same image with its enhanced result with a change and colour and emphasis on different parts of the photograph.

Obviously we could have looked to turn this final image (once edited and cleaned up) into a cart or a poster.    This is a process that we have completed using the Christmas/Festive filter which you can view by clicking on the link here.

If you would like to see additional ideas following this theme then click on this summary post about the process and examples that you could use with a classroom of students.