Market Day 2025: Mini Music Box

 

We have a number of projects for our 2025 Market Day, when our school will be holding a huge event for our local community.

As we have demonstrated and mentioned every student is part of a business group and each group has a product produced by the students using some of the technology and design available to our students.

We cannot showcase all of the individual businesses (although we will of course be producing significant media from the event that we will be posting here).

In this example shown in the photograph the students

have a wind up musical box, which has been housed inside a laser cut box.   Following the construction of the box it has been stained with a wood stain.   As with most of the boxes once they have been flat printed on the laser cutter they are then glued together using wood glue.

Of note with this design there is a handle which actions as a mini crank to work the music box and this can be clearly seen in the photo on the right hand side.

This box took fifteen minutes to print.

Senior Market Day Laser Cut: Pool Table

 

We have spoken on this blog about projects that are being completed by our Auroa Primary School senior (Year Seven and Year Eight) students who are using the school laser cutter to produce products for our school market day 2025.

One group has worked on developing a table game, which initially was using cues to play (see details below).   For the design of the table the school laser cutter was used to design the table.

The dimensions of the table as it stands at present and shown in the photographs is 370mm long is 210mm wide and the base is 70mm high.  It sits on a stand 60mm high.    

The print was made using bamboo composite MDF is 2mm thick.    The wood has then been stained to give the finish shown.   The felt/green look shown in the picture was purchased from a local craft store.

The holes that are shown in the picture need revising.   The students concerned intend using marbles as the playing pieces.   A further potential challenge for the students is that there is currently no track or shoot for the balls to be returned towards the starting point.   The balls currently drop down into the table when they are sunk into a hole.

The students could also further develop the rules for the game and look at ways in which to further develop tools to be used with the game.   The students had experimented with the 3D Printing of cues to play the game with, however the strength required and the skill required to use these correctly has proven to be quite challenging.

As the feature of the Market Day is 'personalisation' as well as innovation this can be addressed by having names custom built into the side of the design.

3D Printed Jewellery Business: Progression

 

We have a School Market Day approaching in October 2025.    As part of the process our students have spent time designing and using our technology to create a range of products.   As detailed previous Market Days can be viewed here.

One of our business ideas was to use Tinkercad to create original 3D Designs which they then could 3D Print.

In the instance shown left the students from our junior school had a discovery time, where they were creating a range of beads and forming a bracelet.  We were able to use the lettering shown left and combine it with the objects and the material that was supplied.

The pink lettering shown in both examples are our students using their 3D Printed Glow-in-the-dark filament.   This provided beads with an additional feature in that it could glow in the dark.

The feedback from the students, in this case junior students (new entrance who are five years old) helped our business students think about design options and how they might improve their product.   They wanted to look at including their own versions of the art blocks (the flowers shown left) that fill out some of the design.   After seeing the examples they again used the scribble option from Tinkercad to create their own take and examples.   These were able to be done quickly and independently by the students concerned.

As shown in the bottom left photograph.   The students also recognised that they could pass on their creations to other students in the classroom who could help with the shapes and the details.  Not all of the designs were able to translate well to printing.

We opted to print in two different colours, using a mixture of red and blue PLA to see which would stand out more.   Some of the designs shown left could be easily recognised, others require more of an interpretation.   The default settings for the printing mean that we are using a regular nozzle etc - but realistically increasing the fine details would not translate to a better print.

3D Printed Glow-in-the-Dark Project Ideas

 

As mentioned on a previous post we have been looking at ways to incorporate and include glow-in-the-dark filament with some of our students other designs and creations.   For example this is the bead group that has started experimenting with including some aspects of the designs, the first, second, fourth and fifth letters are glow-in-the-dark.

We have several groups who are looking at some variation of a night light theme. One of the aspects that matches with the glow-in-the-dark filament is to have it glow by absorbing light.

The Minecraft themed or similar swords shown here have been personalised with a name on the blade and are going to be grouped in combination with some of the other objects that the students have located.   The students have been experimenting with the size and dimensions of each item, some taking thirty seconds or so to complete.

Using or creating 'Lego-ish' figures (or figures that feature similarities from a range of plastic figures).   Students wanted to design figures that had the physical characteristics associated with the figures - the block legs/feet, the square body, the hands and the head.

This student design also included an object in the hands of the figure and they had some challenge with the head, which is why they decided to work on creating a hat.    

The concept of lego and mini-figure like figures has been something we have looked at over the years and practical experience was gained this year by the process of creating the figures for the Dolls House.

One of the groups for our 2025 Market Day has been the creation of key rings specific to a range of customers.    One of the point of differences for our students, which has been as simple as altering the PLA that we are printing with (and not the design) to produce something with a point of difference.

This is also allowing all of our students to think again about how they can use the technology and how they might use glow-in-the-dark filament for projects and prints.   Already we have had students look at the previous projects including the Christmas Ornaments from the past.

3D Printed Market Day 2025 - Update: Beads

 

We are currently in the process of preparing for our 2025 School Market Day - the date of which has now be confirmed for October 31st.

One of the classroom groups has been looking into the process of producing jewellery and individualised beads, spelling out the names of the people who purchase the items.

The students designed each of the letters of the alphabet, in addition to this the group have also printed a range of the letters using glow-in-the-dark filament as well as a range of colours and filament types.

The rationale behind this is to print a significant number of the beads now so that as the market day approaches there are already a significant number of prints made (which we don't anticipate changing significantly between now and the market day) and while we will have the students add to the project before then this allows there to be less pressure moving forward.

3D Printed Term Three Project Updates

 

Currently our Kickstarter inspired Market Day creation videos are currently online on our school website.   These have had the students focus on innovation and personalisation.   You can view the videos from not only Room Seven but also the senior school in general.

In our class the students have been divided into seven different groups each with four or so students.   The students have used a range of our school equipment including the 3D Printers, with Tinkercad used to create unique projects and also the School Laser Cutter and we will be using the Sticker Machine.

An example is the group producing bath toys, as shown left.  They are refining their designs, looking at what they can create and what design aspects need to be considered.   One of the issues for instance with balance with these creations is that if the top of the design is too heavy it will cause the design itself instead of floating to tip over constantly.

Another of our group is producing beads that when they are linked together spell out the name of the student and also have images and designs on alternative blocks.  These students have been refining their designs to ensure that they cover every letter and improving the design of them (as is sometimes the case the designs can look pleasing in virtual form but when they are subsequently printed they can sometimes loose details.   You can read about their efforts here.

This term we are going to allow the students to process the orders, complete the personalisation, packaging and manufacturing and then have the students collect the designs on the Market Day itself, which is intended to allow the students to create unique products within a time frame that is realistic.

Our structured literacy theme is based around weekly subjects, including cats this week.   The shared reading tasks are a way we wanted to bring CAD design task in for our seven and eight year olds.  Given that the turn around was a single week, including design and there are twenty six students who are in the classroom the prospect of printing an entire run of projects was not realistic at this point (as we have mentioned in the past we have three printers that are available to use school wide).   For this project we printed some of the initial designs and then we used the Tinkercad App and its VR/AR function to complete the design.   This allowed a range of students to produce Tinkercad designs and check their viability prior to potential printing.   We have published a slideshow dedicated to non printing options including using filters which is available via this tab here.  In this example shown above the actual print is on the right, the virtual design is on the left and this is without any additional filters being added to the project.