BUILDING WITH BLOCKS IN TINKERCAD
This half term our Year 3’s have been learning how to use Tinkercad to create 3D models and objects on their computers. This clever program lets you create anything you like in three dimensions, which can then be sent to a 3D printer to turn digital designs into real world objects.
To start with our students were introduced to the basics of Tinkercad (including how to resize, rotate, recolour and arrange 3D shapes). They then applied this learning to a series of fun (and slightly bizarre!) challenges – including building a Giraffe in 8 blocks, a favourite food item in 6 blocks, a spaceship with 4 blocks and a self portrait with 2 blocks (and the awesome Scribble tool!). To make it even harder then only had a few minutes for each challenge!
These fun and low-stake challenges helped the children explore the program and encouraged them to create multiple designs very quickly, rather than spending hours on each project. That meant when we came onto designing our Winter Ornaments the children were able to rapidly prototype different ideas before choosing their favourite.
But rather than me telling you about that here’s a video from some of our Year 3’s talking about the project…
DESIGN, REFINE AND PRINT
Once the children had designed a few different winter ornaments it was then time to refine those designs to ensure they looked as great as possible (and that they would print out nicely on our printer).
Part of this process involved checking the dimensions to ensure they all fit inside a 60mm box and also the tricky task of choosing which colour combination they’d like to use!
Lastly, we added a hole to the top to ensure our decorations could be hung up if desired.
After that all that was left was to print them out. An easy task you might think? Well, given we had 113 to print and each one takes nearly an hour it was touch and go whether or not we’d get them all done by the end of term!
Thankfully we managed it and below you can see a gallery of every single decoration designed by our Year 3’s and Year 6’s this year.
DECORATIONS GALLERY
