3D Journey Around the World

We are going into our 3rd year of luckily having our 3D printer in the lab. As each year approaches, my teacher partner and I try to design lessons that will allow students to challenge their 3D design skills.

Our 3D design program of preference is Tinkercad. This makes login seamless with our district Google Accounts and it is useful that it is web based, allowing student to work off of any computer. My only wish, would be for this program to be functional on our student iPads. I really like the creative freedom that this website allows students to experience as opposed to apps that you can download.

We began our project by introducing students to what 3D printing is and for those that experienced a similar lesson last year, we used this as a reflection session. We also took the time to create expectations for this project using Padlet. The results from our student feedback created the rubric for our project.

We then challenged the students to recreate images from our 3D program boot camp. This gave 4th graders the opportunity to learn new skills and for 5th graders to review.

The overall theme for this project, was with the summer Olympics in mind. We had students brainstorm and select an internationally known landmark to use as their inspiration. From there, the designing and creativity was at their fingertips. Overall, I couldn't be happier with their progress and the hard work they are contributing to their final design.