3D Prints!

I can safely say that 3D printing has been a hit. I have learned so much throughout the time it took to teach and print all of my 250 4th and 5th grade students. I started out working with 5th grade and changed how I taught by the time I started 4th grade simply because I learned so much about the process by teaching and printing 5th grade work. Simple things that I hadn't even considered wound up creating fairly major printing errors. Other things that I thought would be problematic wound up being fine. 

I let my students choose to create whatever they wanted to print. We used a free online program called Tinkercad. (I highly recommend it.) I wound up having several students facing the dreaded open-ended project block. I think it was a combination of such wide choice and using a completely new media that was a little tough for some kids. The vast majority of my students had a more concrete plan and wound up creating pretty cool designs. This has been a wonderful way to integrate technology into my classroom. It teaches students new skills that are so incredibly applicable to so many jobs that will be available in the future. 

Printing is what takes the most time. I've been printing pretty much non-stop since winter break. I've completely finished printing my 5th grade work and I'm a little more than 3/5 of the way through 4th grade. The printing should be finished next week! I'm able to print 4-5 designs at a time. I start the printer right when I get to school in the morning and I'm usually able to get two sets per day. The up side is that the printer makes all kinds of futuristic sounds and I can pretend I'm in the Jetsons! 

This is most of the work from one class. It took about three days to print all of these. 

Obviously I'll be using the printer more in the future. I'm working with our gifted intervention specialist to have students create more intricate designs to print and send to our sister school in China. Next year, I'm thinking about more specific lesson ideas to use. I really like the idea of using industrial design and the design process as the basis of a lesson. Students could create designs that would be solutions to a problem they encounter in life. Who knows? The options are endless. 

5th Grade Stop Motion Progress

Animating gummy bears who come out of a
lake and build a village out of dominos. 

This groups is animating lego people on a moon base.
The background is made from a cardboard box and construction paper.

New year, new way of doing a stop motion animation project. This is the fourth year I've undertaken this project with my 5th graders. It is the project that all other kids in the school look at in awe and can't wait to do. In the past, I've just had one digital camera, so I was somewhat limited as to my options for filming. I split the class up into different job groups and they all worked together to make one animation. The work always came out great, but I felt like there wasn't enough freedom. 

This year, I spent a chunk of my budget to get three more cameras and tripods. Each of my 5th grade classes broke up into four groups. Each group gets to write, design, and animate their own stop motion project. Since modeling clay for 100 kids could get out of control cost-wise, all of the animations are being done with other materials this year. I have groups animating with legos, candy, paper, etc. The pictures above were taken during the first day of filming this week. 

I'll post the finished animation in a few weeks. We still have a couple more weeks of filming along with editing in iMovie. That is another change for this year. In the past, I've always edited the whole project myself. I'm nervous/hopeful/excited about the potential results. I can't wait to show them off.