We have been using our 3D printer now for about a week and it has made some pretty amazing things for our classroom! We are still fundraising for 3D pens to add to our arsenal, so if you are interested in those please check out our Indiegogo project here.
Our first week has been spent learning some of the basics of Tinkercad, which is a free online 3D designing studio. They have an additional part of their website where we can create lessons, videos and templates and communicate as a classroom. We are pretty excited to see what we can make and what we can do.
The other item we have spent just a little time on is Makerbot's Thingiverse where people can upload and share items they have designed in 3D. It's pretty crazy to see how complicated some designs are and how useful many of the items are such as a phone case, stove knob, toothbrush holder, and even Lego cars!
Our first project will be a small keychain name badge like the blue one in the photo. It's been a challenge to design and is a little harder than you might think! We have lots to learn for sure.
The Chadron Cardinals tag at the top was also an experiment since our printer doesn't print in two colors. To do something like that, you have to stop the printer and switch out filaments in the middle of printing which takes a pretty good amount of patience and guesswork to get it right. I may have messed up a few prints in the process, but now I have a pretty good handle on it.
We have some student projects that should starting printing within the next few weeks or so and we will put lots of photos up once we have some projects in hand.
Here are a few time-lapse videos of our printing. My apologies but you will have to pause the video at the end to see the final product.
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