Further Ongoing End of Year Printing Projects - 2022

As we move towards our end of school year in New Zealand we have a group of students who have been working on 3D Printing related projects during the year.   These projects include:

3D Printed Flexi-Animal: Raptor

We have featured a huge array of prints from one student this year who is continuing to drive themselves to complete a range of complex and detailed task.   Their latest flexi-animal design (completely original) is this mini raptor.

This print took two hours to complete and will be featured in a seperate post at later date.   There is no additional details required for this print as it is fully finished the linking is correctly and working as intended.   The print time has come in at two hours perfect for this size of project/animal.

3D Printed Pig: Piggy Wiggy

The student has redesigned this again wanting to experiment and establish successful linking between the sections of the pig so that the animal can be posed or adjusted.   The previous larger version of this was sixteen hours - this newer version is a quarter of the size hence the four hour print time.   The student has designed the features of the face by themselves and used Tinkercad to do so - so it is a completely original design as we have stated of the highest standard. 

3D Printed Bottle Cap Launcher

A student has continued to work on the launching mechanism associated with a design found on Thingiverse.   The original is based around using a US coin to provide the counterweight - the student was challenged to match this to a New Zealand coin of similar size.   The student has also engineered the launching mechanism by introducing a magnet to hold the battle cap in place and used a hot glue gun to modify the inside of the gun.   The student wanted to create additional space in the inside of the gun and thus used a hot glue gun which reached the required temperature to melt the existing PLA so he was able to complete a considerable modification.   There has been no additional printing since this was first detailed on this blog however the student is intending to print additional material for the launcher once he has completed the internal engineering.

3D Printed Animal Contact Tags

In another classroom in the school with Year 3/4 students the teacher has just started the students on 3D Printing and 3D Printed projects.   Their very first foray into 3D Printing is to look at producing a dog tag or animal tag, suitable to hang on the collar of a domestic animal.  The students are producing and individual print which is taking 15 to thirty minutes to print.    A basic example is shown left the print being 70mm across 40mm high and 5mm thick.

Misc 3D Printed Projects - Term 2: 2020

The return to school in New Zealand this term, and a return to regular classroom programs has allowed the students to be back designing and creating in the classroom (the 3D Printer used to create everything on this site is a single Ultimaker 2+ which is why there are colour themes for particular print runs.   We felt to due every print justice that we would feature a few individually and also put up a sequence of some of the others.   These are a selection of prints that our students are currently working on.

A basic design, with plenty of examples and exemplars on this site, allowing someone to create something (following a tutorial created last year as a 'Flipped' video by ten year old students) which is functional and allowing someone to be successful and design something at their first attempt.

The print took two and a half hours to print included a small amount of rafting (which was just the outside outline as shown.   No refinements etc were required.

A second student designed something similar and independent of the other student.   The student is nine years old and working with Tinkercad for the first time. 

They were given a 1:1 explanation of how to use this by another student who was able to follow these verbal instructions and produce this print.   The print took two and a half hours to complete was 100mm across, 90mm high and 5mm thick.   The student was extremely pleased with the design and wanted to use white as a base colour and then spray paint at least two colours over the top.

This student has shown an interest in design and creation and wanted to customise this design to hold stationary.   On production of the print and trying it with various items of stationary the student made the decision that it would be more suitable for a container that allowed her to store her jewellery and in particular her earings, so had a change of purpose for that.

Design took four hours to print and was done so with minimal PLA.   The student was extremely pleased with this design and creation which was her first independent design.