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Isla's game pieces
Isla created these professional looking piece for her board game.
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Phoebe in Year 10's Mini Robots
Young Phoebe made Mini Robots on the Cube as pieces for her board game.
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Year 9's Keytags in SketchUp
Though only using the basic option Year 9 students were able to come up with some great designs.
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Year 9's Keytags
A 13-14 year old group activity produced these pretty amazing results
Anna Marriott a Design & Technology teacher at Chederit School is approaching the end of a first full term of 3D Printing with her students. In her latest blog she and the children explore how the printer has benefitted their coursework and how they've advanced beyond the basic software packages.
Coursework deadlines are fast approaching for our Technology students in year 11 (5th year senior school). Some of our students have been including models printed on the Cube as part of their controlled assessment.
Isla Johnson decided to 3D print cone shaped activity pieces for her Adventure Activity Pack for children. Isla said: “It looks so much more professional using ABS plastic 3D printed for the pieces rather than trying to make them out of modelling clay. As I needed several pieces we tried to print more than one at the same time, but we found scaling them the same size a bit of a problem, however as they were quite small it did not take too long to 3D print separately”
Luckily Isla had finished her pieces before we had a technical hitch with the print head, which suddenly stopped taking the plastic feed. We followed the online instructions how to unblock the feed head, but unfortunately it did not solve the problem, so we got in touch with 3D Systems our supplier of the Cube. They were BRILLIANT! Replied straight away to emails, and virtually straight away sent a replacement part which we were able to attach very easily and then get back on track to print off other students work.
Phoebe Stevens in year 10 3D printed mini robot pieces for her game which was a final trial project before choosing her controlled assessment coursework piece. She commented: “I was really pleased with the way the mini robots came out, printing them separately meant that they did not come out exactly the same size so we need to work out how to print more than 1 at the same time. We are also finding that the software that we are using ‘SketchUp make’ is struggling with fine detail, but we have realised that as we are currently only running the free version available from Google, that we do not have full access to all the features.”
We tried a group activity with year 9 (3rd year senior school) they had to produce a giveaway gift to promote the movie that they are designing. Key tags came up as the most popular choice. Harry Beck said:
“It was cool to see your idea made up into 3D real product instead of just drawing it and having to imagine how it would look! We managed to print off several at the same time, which saved time, it was much better as it only took three hours to print six of them.”
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Some of the projects came out better than others, we think that the fine detail is too small on some. We now need to file them down now to improve the finish.”
To help the situation with the fine detail we have had the go ahead to update this software to ‘Sketch Up Pro’ and hope that soon we will have it installed and then we will hopefully have more success.
