Welcome to the Elementary STEM Coach Podcast. I’m your host, Naomi Meredith, a former classroom teacher turned K-5 STEM teacher and coach. With over a decade of experience teaching and a master’s degree in STEM leadership, I’m here to coach you throughout the year to help you gain back more time to create innovative experiences for your students.

If you’re looking for a quick 3D printing project that your students can do in about two days without any 3D printing experience, this episode is perfect for you. Likewise, if you are a teacher who’s also wanting to start 3D printing in your classroom and you’re unsure how to get started, this is an easy, low entry point 3D printing project where even you as the teacher, you don’t need a ton of experience as well. I’m going to be sharing with you a project that I am currently doing with my students.

They’re going to get their prints back next week if you’re listening to this in real time and I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode. This entire lesson, I will have linked in the show notes for you. So, I created worksheets, videos, examples, everything you need, the teaching slides, it’s all there for you.

So, you don’t have to go out and search for it. I literally made it for you and for the kids. I use it with my own students.

So, that will be linked and get you well on your way. When I’m designing 3D prints, I am a huge advocate for using Tinkercad in the classroom. I’ve been using that since 2018 with my students, but I actually don’t use Tinkercad for this project.

Instead, I use the free website. It is called Doodle 3D Transform. It’s a free open source website, so there’s no logging in, no accounts you need to create, which also saves time to begin with, and there also is a paid app for the iPads, which it works slightly better.

It doesn’t zoom in and out and get a little crazy, which can happen when you use this app. So, if you have a little bit of money, I would recommend if you have only tablets, try buying the app. It just works slightly better, but if you can’t, this is what I did, is you can just create a QR code of the website and then kids can scan it and use it on the iPads and just tell them just to be really careful.

The screen will zoom in and you can’t zoom it out and then have to restart their project, so just be aware of that. This project, I did it in line with Halloween. I had them get to this website.

You could draw in Tinkercad if you really want to. It’s just that the tools are a bit limited when it comes to drawing specifically. So, what it looks like on this app, it’s one page.

They don’t have to click around. It’s so easy to get started. It’s really fun.

Where on the left side, they draw their design using their finger. There are a few tools at the bottom. There’s a select tool.

You could select the whole project and move it around. There’s the drawing tool, so it gives you some options. There’s a pencil, a line tool, so just drawing perfect straight lines, and a paintbrush.

I recommend using the paintbrush. That one draws and prints the best. The pencil’s a little weird with the printing.

I’ve tried it. It just breaks apart. It’s strange, so definitely use the paintbrush.

There’s an eraser. There’s a few stamps with basic shapes. You can also change the colors, too.

If you have a 3D printer that can print in multiple colors, which I do, kids can create using colors, and you can download as an OBJ file where it will save all the color options. So, that’s a whole project. I’m not talking about that in this episode.

I let them draw in multiple colors, but I told them I’m only printing this in white, and since it’s for Halloween, my white glows in the dark. So, I’ll also link that for you, and what I did is I printed out different Halloween how-to-draw examples that I made, so I made them for kids. There’s 10 different options as inspiration or support because they are drawing their design, and I didn’t want kids to feel intimidated that they were drawing and saying, I don’t know how to draw anything.

Well, I created step-by-step kid-friendly directions for you. So, these are one-page printables that are in that lesson that I talked about. I wasn’t very strict on it being Halloween.

Most of them did Halloween. Some did not, which is totally fine. Again, whatever vibes you’re going for.

I’m planning on creating other themes, Halloween’s where we’re at right now. The kids draw directly in the app. One quick thing before you download all their prints is either you have the students or you do it, but you need to create some sort of hook on the keychain.

I went through and did this while I was saving. I just added the little hook, and my video in the lesson shows you exactly how I do this because punching holes through a 3D print when after it’s printed is really difficult. It could break your print.

It might not be where you want it. So, I show you exactly how to do this in the video. And for this specific project, I downloaded or exported the files as STL files and sent them to my computer.

This is probably the hardest part, and you need to be very, very organized to do this. So, because there isn’t a login for this, I save it in two ways. So, I made the kids give me their iPads when they were done, and I actually had a share iPad.

So, there’s an option to save it directly in the app and or the specific web browser. Definitely play around your devices and how you want to save it before you do this with kids. So, try it on a device by yourself first.

Figure out how you’re going to get the files off of your device, and you’ll totally be fine. The iPads that I was borrowing didn’t have Google Drive downloaded on it, didn’t have AirDrop enabled. So, I wish I checked before because I sat there for 45 minutes after my club, and I had to log into my Gmail account on every single iPad and email myself those files.

But I didn’t know how else to get them off. I didn’t have access to download any apps. So, just figure it out.

AirDrop is fantastic if you can do that. Once I have all their files downloaded, I save them in a folder on my desktop with the name of the class. I also have a free 3D printing station that literally goes through how you can organize all your prints.

I’m not going to get into that right now, but I have pictures and everything in that freebie I’ll link below and how I get all of that organized for the kids. Once you get everything organized with your files and you get these printed, they’re going to print really fast and you probably can get a whole class done in two to three rounds and be done. The cool thing about creating things in Doodle 3D Transform is all of the prints are flat.

So, yes, you have all these cute little designs like a little ghost or pumpkin. It has all the curves, but everything’s going to be the same height and print quickly because you don’t need to print with supports. Nothing hangs off the edges.

It prints really nice and it’s really, really fast, which you could get if you started today. Tomorrow, the next day, you could get this done by Halloween. Once the prints are all done, you have them organized.

You know who’s is who. You put each kid’s print in a bag with their name on it. That’s what I do.

Then I provide them a bunch of different paint markers, which I’ll link the brand I’ve been rebuying every year below, and I let the kids just decorate their cutie little keychains. If you are doing glow-in-the-dark, I recommend just coloring one side, which also helps with them drying a little bit faster because the glow will kind of come through, but it’s best if you just keep one side empty. You can attach that cute little keychain and you’re good to go.

They did a project and they’re excited. They’re proud of it. They made it on a device and it’s a good stepping stone into Tinkercad or just a quick project.

You’re using your printers and again, this is really great, especially for the primary students where they really want to design their own 3D prints. They’re not ready for Tinkercad yet and you’re helping them understand the process of what 3D printing is, how to get started, how to be the creator, how to create without using AI. They’re using their own brains.

They’re using their own drawings and they turn out really, really cute. Again, everything’s going to be linked for you in the show notes below and if you’re not already following me on Instagram at Naomi Meredith underscore, I share lots of examples about 3D printing, what I’m doing and questions that you have. I try to answer those in post, so let me know what you think.

Tag me if you do this project and also keep an eye out for other holiday themes because if you’re not ready to do this for Halloween, I’m going to create themes for all the other holidays. I’m a theme person, so you know I will. Thanks for being here and I will chat with you soon.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the Elementary STEM Coach Podcast. I would love to connect with you over on Instagram at Naomi Meredith underscore or send me an email to elementarystemcoachpodcast at gmail.com. Also, make sure to check out my website Naomi Meredith dot com to see all the show notes from today’s episode and shop my K-5 STEM resources. Any questions you have, needs for resources or ideas for episodes, get in touch.