Let me just start off by saying that 3D Printers are seriously the COOLEST thing ever!! We were told on class Thursday that we were going to be 3d printing a dream house that upcoming Monday... that whole weekend I was super excited and was trying to think of what my dream house was. A big open house, with lots of windows , dark wood floors and out in the country with loads of land, yep that's my dream house but I was pretty sure I couldn't put all that into a 3d printer haha
When arriving to class we were able to go take a look at the printer and the different things it has printed. It was really interesting to see how the machine moved and made the printed objects. After observing that, we went into the computer room and created an account online on Tinkercad. Tinkercad is a website where you are able to digitally design and build things that you are then able to print to the 3d printer. We first began by clicking on "Create a New
Design", which opened up a work space with a column of shapes that we can scroll through and drag onto the work space. We first dragged out a cube onto the workspace and learned how to make the object larger on width and length by dragging the middle vector points outward... pretty easy! Then we were told to add a rectangle to the top of it to make a house. You couldn't just simply drag the shape upward, but instead to make the shape taller there is a cone shape vector on the top of the object that you can drag up and down. You can then click off onto the workspace and right click (and hold down) an area in order to look at the different angles of the creation. Also we learned that if you select multiple shapes (hold down shift, and click on them) you can then fuse them together with the "Group" icon in the top right, or by pressing "control", "g". This feature is helpful when trying to create holes in objects, you are able to select the grey shapes and group them with objects to create holes. This was all pretty easy to learn within 5 minutes, I know young kids would be able to understand it fast too!
After having a quick lesson, we jumped right into creating our dream house. Our professor explained how he only wanted a brief lesson over the basics so that we could figure out he rest on our own and explore. I started off by sketching out an idea of what I kind of wanted the house to look like... big, lots of widows, and a porch! I've always loved designing things online so I was pretty excited to get started.
I first dragged out a rectangular prism, made it the size I wanted then kept on adding. It was pretty easy to get the hang of it. I discovered that you can change it from simple shapes (cubes, prisms) to other 3d shapes (3d text, pipes, weave patterns, and more). I incorporated the weave pattern to create a patio cover and a rock like texture to create stone pillars. I was honestly having so much fun with this. I ended up creating the big house with windows and a porch after all and I loved it!
I would absolutely use this as a lesson for my future classroom! This was so easy to learn how to do, even for young kids. They would be able to make their own unique creations, whether that be a house, a recreation on their favorite stuffed animal, food or dream car, the possibilities are endless! Then they can learn and observe how a 3d printer works. I think this is a great lesson for all ages.
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