3D Printed Mathematical Object Star

Above: The 'star' printed design

This was the final 3D Designed Object that was entered by students in our local Mathematical 3D design competition.   The students who were responsible for this design and print were Y8 students who were 12 or 13 years old, as were the other objects in the series.

How long did it take to print: the student assured me that the print in question took three hours to print.   I concluded based on my experience that this was not correct, as given the size of the object it would have been a minimum of thirteen hours of print.  It was printed on a 'fast print' setting.
Size: 15 centimetres.
Problems or Issues: the print had multiple angles and points of the star, as a result the print had various rough points and points that needed to be finished.  The print was designed and created without rafting using Tinkercad.
What would you do differently: The student would have created a bigger star to be more impressive.

3D Printed Mathematical Objects - 'Rubiks cube'

Rubix cube final print

This is the third in the series of students created 3D Printed objects that were entered by students as part of a local Mathematical competition.   Traditionally in the 3D Design section of the competition the students have created objects from traditional material, to our knowledge our school is the first to 3D Print objects specifically for the competition - although of the four objects entered only the previous 'Lemon Squeezer' object achieved a 'merit' placing.

The student responsible for this 3D Print wrote a post about it on her student blog.  You can view the link by clicking here.

Original design in Tinkercad

How long did it take to print? Twenty hours approximately - the student was unsure about the settings and passed it onto the classroom teacher once it was designed in Tinkercad.  Judging by the weight and the quality of the finish it was printed on a 'fast print' setting like most of our prints.
Problems/Issues: The rafting is visible on the base of the print, this wasn't sufficient to be easily removed and as a result was still visible on the finished print.   A further design issue was that the entire print was one colour and the student would have preferred to create one based on different colours, although not those necessarily from a traditional Rubix cube.
What would you do differently: The student had considered the combination of colours and somehow printing a combination of colours to have different squares.  However there would have been issues, the design of a Rubix cube has shapes on the sides of each square and they could be individually rotated - the other question was the gap between the blocks, this was created but cutting a regular box shape and inserting a gap, this was simple to do with a basic design but combining colours which would have to be rejoined together which would have been much more challenging.