Click Here to see my adobe voice video
This week I used tinkercad.com for the first time to learn about designing objects for 3D printing. My brother and I always mix our phones up because we have the same phone and cell phone case so I decided to make a personalized cell phone case.
The first step in the making process this week was to watch the tutorials on how to perform functions on tinkercad.com. One of the first few functions I learned was how to place a 3D shape in the design grid area and how to hollow the shape out.
After playing around with different shapes and hollowing them out I decided to save time by uploading a blank iPhone 6 case. I wasn't too sure of the phone dimensions and had already spent some time trying to cut holes out for the charger and buttons on my original shape. I thought this was a cool feature of tinkercad. Often time can be an issue with projects like this in school. Students could take something from other peoples shared work, hack and remix it.
I placed letter shapes to make my name onto the design grid. Something I found easy was making the size of the lettering all the same size.
What was challenging was moving the letters and placing them on the side of the phone case. I could not figure out how to make them parallel to the phone case and they were going right through the case template. Eventually with some trial and error and re-watching a shape rotation tutorial I figured out how to manipulate the shapes by moving them up and down and using the dial to fix the rotation of the letter.
I decided not to include the last three letters of my name and to make all the letters and phone case one colour. Pink.
Next I learned how to convert my phone case into an STL file for printing in the future.
I really like tinkercad and think it would be great to use in the junior and intermediate grades. I think it might also be beneficial to have students working on these projects collaboratively to problem solve together.
Something to keep in mind is that not everything students design using programs like tinkercad have to be printed. Tinkercad has a the option for students to develop objects and upload them into the game minecraft which is a game most young students are using in education and even personally and will be explored further in the next module.