3D Printing
I had a blast today in class. There is so much value for kids to work on projects such as these, bringing imagination to life while forcing them to use critical thinking and problem-solving. I have always wanted to create something with a 3D printer, so this was a pretty cool experience.
Several things to consider. 1. Everyone spends too much time staring at a screen each day. If we can make something without the use of a 3D printer, we can avoid unnecessary screen use. That being said, this is educational screen time and will create something physical to play with for the kids. 2. Not everyone will be able to use this resource, even if it is on a platform as easy to use as TINKERCAD. There were students in our class today that struggled, so if university students have a hard time how will a 3rd grader do? 3. The world already has enough stuff in it, so is it really that awesome to melt a bunch of plastic into a little trinket if it means were adding more to a landfill. These creations need structures and supports to print, which will be discarded as soon as the product is done. We discussed this last part during our class today.
On that note of useless plastic; here is what I created both before and during our class today.
The house was my first design and was the most straightforward to make. I pretty much just stacked pieces on top of each other. The chess piece and the mushroom were more complicated, needing many adjustments to work properly.
Great blog post Sage!
I appreciate that you recognize useless waste 3D printing can create, it’s important to stay environmentally conscious especially with larger classes. I think it could be helpful to consider changing the “Several things to consider” from numbers in the paragraph into a list format or sub-divisions to improve the experience for those who may use a text-to-speech reader or translation service. I think your text/background colour are perfectly accessible and would be super easy for almost anyone to read!