I'm so excited that we've decide to do a 3D printing project in each lower school grade. It's a fun way to reinforce concepts like 3D shapes, spacial reasoning, design, etc. I have to confess, I was a little nervous about having the younger kids use TinkerCad on the Chromebooks. I could see a steep learning curve and was worried the students might be so frustrated with the tool that they missed the point of the lesson. I'm happy to say - we found a super cool 3D Design tool called 3DC. It's free and it works on an iPad, iPhone, Chrome, Android, and web enabled device, and it's very intuitive to use. Take a look at the video and see for yourself. | |
I talked to Laura about it and we came up with a great idea on how to roll it out to the students. Rather than just learn the tool for the 3D printing project, we'll use it as if it were virtual blocks or 3D tangrams. We'll start off with a guided discovery of the tool and later tie it into a lesson. For example, the 1st grade is currently learning about 3D shapes. Below is an example of what they are learning in class. We might do an extension activity using 3DC. For example we might ask the students to make something out of 3 cubes, 1 pyramid, and 2 spheres. Once they're proficient using the tool, we can do a 3D printing project.