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.

3D Printed Market Day: Final Product Octopus

 

This design has undergone a series of developments and refinements and is now being completed ready for the 2025 School Market Day.

We have previously spent time explaining the design process - the refinement process and how this project has evolved with the students Tinkercad designs.

The design is being designed into three sizes and all of these will have small variations in the details that are added to the design.  In this instance figure has a top hot on its head.  

One of the excellent aspects of using the Bambu Lab software to process the .stl file is that it clearly shows the details that the students need to make decisions about their business and recently we have started discussing profit and loss.

The print time for the this print on the Bambu H2D is just over two and a half hours.   42g of PLA filament was used to create this print.   For a regular roll of PLA we could complete 23 of these prints.  We would need to make a recoup of $1.70 NZD from each of these prints to meet the students printing costs (the listed price from Bambu is 0.96).    For the purpose of the profit and loss for the students the price point that they need to set for the large Octopus.

As printed on the Bambu H2D there is absolutely minimum rafting that is associated with this print - the linking between the tentacles as shown is how it was removed from the plate, without the need for removal of any waste plastic.

The dimensions of this print has the individual tentacles at 60mm.   The base of the main body is 50mm across and 50mm high.   

The final decision that the students need to consider is the different PLA that the prints are completed with.   As the students are targeting a design that they want to float the design in water.

3D Printed Project: Junior Evolution of Progressions

 

In March of this year we started the process of preparing for Auroa Primary School  Market Day 2025 with the concepts of innovation, personalisation and creation coming to the fore.   In this instance one of the groups decided to work on bath toys.

They used Tinkercad to create independent designs and then created a variety of tests for the prototypes to ensure that they met the brief and were correct.   You can follow the early progress and ideas formation by clicking on this link - or using the 'search' option on the right hand side and using the keyword 'Octopus'.

While we knew the floating aspect of the design would work the students wanted to explore balance and stability.  This has come up in the past with our work on 3D Printed boats and other objects - you can read details of the post about this challenge here.

This final design shown left met many of the design briefs - and students used it in their AR/VR focus and creation for the business.   However the base of the designs created some challenges for the students.   They attempted to water proof the designs using spray and hot glue gun and tried to consider design solutions while maintaining the shape.  The design in this format 90mm across at the base, 90mm high at the top of the hat.   Essentially in this format the print was either two or four hours depending on the machined.    

A variety of shapes this size were used - and while they met the floating brief - the designs were not waterproof.   Finally as noted with the boat design the base of the design needed to be expanded to ensure that the print didn't tip as soon as it was placed in water.  Initially the students added several elements to the shapes, monocles, ribbons, bowties - however when discussed a young child potentially could break some of these elements off, so as the designs were refined a lot of these elements were removed.   

The solution that the students came to was to look at the PLA that was used for printing.   Interesting the students were able to identify that the basic colours appeared to seal better at the base of the design than colours such as the silk (multi-coloured).   Examples such as the one show left were shown to remain buoyant after days of testing although they were somewhat unbalanced.

The design shown left took forty minutes to print using the Snapmaker machines and measured 30mm across at the base and was 25mm high.   The design was put in water as noted - and while it did not sit perfectly the students felt it passed the purpose test as a working bath toy.

However students felt while it was adequate they still felt that it lacked the dynamic impact of some of the elements that they had seen in flexi-animals and wanted to look at some way to increase the size of or the details around the tentacles.     This Octopus which we first attempted in 2022 was something of the inspiration - and while we have had students working on flexi aspect of the design these students have not, and the timeframe for the completion of the designs meant that feasibly the skill would take longer than is practical.

The solution that the students came up with was to redesign the Octopus placing the emphasis on the tentacles and producing a more clearly flat design.   They wanted to locate a design that already featured the tentacles and use their knowledge that they had developed to work on the head of the octopus and included in that personalisation for the customers who had indicated .

This meant that they moved in the direction of a more standard design.  This was highlight by various designs that had linking completed and were flexi animals.  This is something that we have spent considerable time on in the past developing and exploring ideas such as this.   

In this example shown left the students attempted to redesign the animal with the emphasis now (clearly) shown to be on the tentacles.  In this first attempt a prior example was used and the student made a basic attempt to alter the dimensions of the print.  This is the black design shown above.

This was not successful as the print did not have the depth to allow the linking to work successfully.   This print originally took forty five minutes.  A revised print took one and a half hours.  The revised version is shown left which included raised 10mm tentacles which when removed from the plate flowed and showed movement when placed in water.   The students determined that with the action that they would expect to see in the form of movement in the bath that the 'swimming' motion would appear with the tentacles of the octopus moving - the head or body creating the buoyancy.

The final step for the students now that the finished design has been determined is to include the personalisation and the features that the students previously experienced with the early designs.   

Ideally the students will also experiment with and develop their design skills with the linking, time permitting.    Finally to note the students involved in this process are Y3 and Y4 students from our school.  This means that the students involved are seven and eight years old who have been using Tinkercad for either one or two years in the classroom.
      

Market day 2025 - Final Print Runs

 

It is currently the school holidays in New Zealand between term three and term four, we will be back to our regular schedule of printing at that time.   In the meantime we are preparing for the major school event for the year as regular visitors to this site will be aware - our School Market Day for 2025 is taking place on Friday 31st October.

Challenge: To produce a unique product featuring personalisation, innovation and creation using the technology available to our students.

Background: Every student in the senior school at Auroa Primary School as well as the middle school classrooms.   As we have explained before we have seven groups that are operating, one of which is the 'Bath Toys' themed group.  These designs have been previously detailed and adapted and these versions are now the personalised versions that are available to customers.   These prints and the process to create them has been detailed on posts on this blog such as here.

Level of Difficulty: Medium - the design that is shown here has undergone several revisions, however all of the key features of the design have come from the main Tinkercad interface, and the students concerned have been able to revise the design several times.   An example of this is the adaption to remove several additional features to ensure that the design is as plain as possible.   Given that there are children who could be handling the designs (although we have also looked into age appropriate toys for the group as well for instance no under two year olds) the students removed earlier features like eyebrows and details on the hat or anything that could be interpreted as sharp.

Size: 80mm across, 80mm wide/long and 60mm high.  This was the dimensions of one of four designs that had similar dimensions that were printed simultaneously on the Bambu H2D.   The students have always intended to have a group of designs, three in total, and this is intended as the biggest of the three.

Cost: The machine indicated that to print the four designs on standard default settings that 200g of filament would be used and the cost would be $5.00 (USD) to complete the print (of four).

Timeframe: The completion of the print took eight hours in total on the Bambu H2D.   The project would not have been undertaken on the Snapmaker for the reasons that the duration would have been in the range of 16 hours and that would have also called into question the ability of the machine to print all four designs without any problems.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: There is a couple of issues that are still needing to be identified with the range of print.   The biggest issue which is not clearly visible is under.

As can be seen in the picture shown left, the base of the design has a small hole in it, which has occurred as a result of the printing process.   This is visible in the top left had corner of the print.   The student will be needing to problem solve this issue when they return next term.    By not water proofing the design at this point the design when tested has shown to fill with water and while it does not damage the integrity of the print, the students need to seal it.

The teacher has in mind using a hot glue gun or using a water sealant on this part of the design but the students are going to undertake the research and testing when they return from the school holidays.

3D Printed Original Articulated Animals - Highest Degree of Difficulty

Challenge: To create and successfully print an original articulated animal of challenging design.

Background: The student who has been responsible for creating the original articulated animals including the Kiwi, the Lion and other animals featured on this print was looking for ways to extend her designs and her animals, one of the animals she felt could make a striking design.     She choose an Octopus for this purpose.   The challenge was based around the legs of the Octopus and have them interact with the body of the Octopus.   This took several versions of this print to get correct so the student was happy with it.

Versions one and two featured legs that didn't have the width to support the print and were too fragile and needed to be replaced.   The third completed version the student was more happy with - this however left her thinking about other design aspects - one was the length of the legs, the second was whether it was robust enough to allow it to be repeatedly handled.    Finally the use of the arms as they stand led the student to look into creating a hook for the Octopus so it might be easily hung from the roof and then sway in the wind.

Level of Difficulty: High - this was specifically to challenge this student who has shown a high degree of design, thinking - this was not for the faint heartened and nor was ever intended to be.   

Size: The main body of the Octopus was 60mm across and 45mm high.   The tentacles are currently 50mm long although as noted the student is examining options to develop this further.   

Timeframe: The final version of this print took three and a half hours, earlier versions which were not considered successful were one hour and two hours.   These resulted in the tentacles of the Octopus not being robust enough.   Even with a three hour print examining the eyelets of the tentacles they are looking considerably weak in locations.

What would we do differently/next steps for students: As noted the student has spent considerable time reworking this design at present and is continuing to refine and work on the design this student is showing an incredibly aptitude towards being creative and challenging themselves.    It is anticipated that she will rework this design again considerably.

However this is a student who is twelve years old working independently to an extremely high standard.