Student Voice Extended Through 3D Printing

At the very beginning of the year, a student raced into the library to tell me about his goal to design and 3D print his own Skylanders figures. He knew what he wanted to do, but I worried about how his enthusiasm might be lost in the demands of the curriculum standards. His story led me to my goal this year of “empowering student voice”.

I spent time showing him Tinkercad and he did design his own figure and 3D print it.

About to try round 2 of #3dprinting Cooper's action figure. @jenniferlagarde #tlchat #makered http://t.co/M1Z1iMS84e—
Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) October 21, 2014

Cooper is so proud of his action figure. All designed on his own. #studentvoice #makered #tlchat @MakerBotAcademy pic.twitter.com/vNZMXAu8Pn

— Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) October 22, 2014

When you take time to honor an individual student voice like this, you sometimes wonder if the time with one student in a school of 600 is worth it, but it is! Recently, this same student decided that he wanted 3D printing to be part of a book project he was working on. His class just finished reading The Westing Game and each group of students is working on a book float to highlight things that they learned about the book. His group immediately emailed me to see if they could use the 3D printer to design a chess piece for the float.

They worked independently of me and the knowledge of using Tinkercad was passed on to all 4 members of the group. They even branched off and made their own designs and chose their favorite from the group designs. They were bubbling with excitement to get their design printed. Since it had lots of hanging edges, it required supports. Supports take a long time to remove, but the group took turns coming in and working on removing the supports with my help.

Ss designed their on Westing Game chess piece for a book project using @tinkercad #makered #tlchat #3dprinting http://t.co/JIlL9ZxHsJ—
Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) March 20, 2015

Removing support from #3dprinting is a pain. Any tips? #makered #edchat #makerspace http://t.co/5PindjFH7L—
Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) March 23, 2015

Now they have switched to sandpaper to smooth out their #3dprinting chess piece #makered #tlchat http://t.co/n0cblzmgey—
Andy Plemmons (@plemmonsa) March 23, 2015

Now this one student voice has empowered 3 more, and my hope is that those 4 voices will continue to empower even more.