It’s quite a complex process with some fiddly technical steps along the way to making a great product.
I had a mixed ability class with incredibly talented students at one end and battlers at the other end. A few did leave early in the piece, for various reasons, but those battlers who displayed some initial reluctance did warm to the project as it proceeded. When it came to 3D printing their Turtle Art design without exception all students became excited. They had never done 3D printing before.
I did make efforts to setup a situation where students worked in groups and helped each other. They nominated their preferred partners, I then set up groups. I also sometimes asked them to fill out a planning sheet at the start of lesson (questions like ‘Which shapes do you plan to make today?’) and end of lesson (questions like ‘Who helped you?’, ‘Who did you help?’ and ‘Give some details of the help’). I make this part of the assessment criteria. Some students emerged as brilliant helpers of others while some others learnt to find the right person to ask. I was trying to nudge them in those collaborative directions and had some success with that.
Turtle Art Design: I did provide scaffolding here, which I blogged about earlier. I'm thinking now that I need to elaborate on this process further in a separate blog. Stay tuned.
I did produce a Help sheet “FROM TURTLE ART TO TINKERCAD TO 3D PRINTING” guide students through the fiddly bits where they transitioned between different software. Some important points:
Turtle Art steps: Make sure your Turtle Art shape:- Has a Clean block on top
- Has pensize set to 10
The Turtle Art default pen size is 4. I found that when this flowed through to the 3D print the lines weren’t thick enough so I upgraded this to size 10.
You can save your Turtle Art file as an SVG which is needed to import into Tinkercad. I told students to choose outline and then plain, not framed, as the frame turned out too bulky and detracted from the art work.
Tinkercad steps: This was students first use of Tinkercad. This project was a good place to start because the Tinkercad steps were relatively easy. Teachers can setup a Tinkercad class with student nicknames to sign in. I always give students the opportunity to choose their own nicknames.
When they imported their SVG I suggested scale to 10% since otherwise the import was too big. I then told them to drop a ruler on the workplane and resize their shape to 90x90x2mm. The 2mm height was enough to make a good impression on the clay. A bigger height would have just meant longer 3D print time.
Students then gave their file a meaningful name and exported from Tinkercad to create a *.STL file
Prusa Slicer steps: I’m a big fan of the Prusa 3D printers. However, they don’t come with a prepackaged configuration, which is a pain, so I had to produce another step taking students through that process.
Once configured the process was straightforward since the sizes have been done in Tinkercad and just have to be confirmed. I did tell students that they had to save as 3MF and send me that file before they have permission to print. They also had to export their GCODE and not get confused about the functions of the different files. GCODE for the 3D printer and 3MF so the teacher could check everything was ready.
3D printing: This was the first time these students had done 3D printing and they were delighted to see that all their hard digital work was producing an atomic product!
Clay step: I've written about this in another blog. Not much to add except that I did 3D print guides for the students to roll their clay evenly to 6mm.
Painting step: I've also written about this here. We did apply varnish after drying to seal all over.
Overcoming bottleneck points: Real life classes are messy things due to varying student abilities, motivations and some absences. At any rate I needed a “filler”, something engaging for students to go on with who were up to date with everything else. Luckily at the right moment Gary Stager made his Turtle Art cards available. Go to Invent to Learn and when you quit you'll see the pop up. These are 156 beautiful Turtle Art projects. The code is supplied with an image of the finished product. Students went on with these while others were catching up. I even had one student who became so engaged with these cards that she did all of them!!!
Turtle Art Tiles Project
Scaffold for Turtle Art Tiles Project
Working with Clay
Working with Acrylics
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