3D design | Occasional Observations of Traveling Technology Coach

3D Trinket

04 Aug 2025 Leave a comment

A colleague showed me this amazing lesson to make safari-themed trinkets using Tinkercad.com and a 3D printer.

1) Find a free jpg image of an animal from a safari-themed clip art website. (Obviously any jpg will do, it just so happens that the theme for their school’s prom is “safari.”) I choose a tree from clipart-library.com.

2) Use online-convert.com to change the image file into a .svg file.

3) Log into Tinkercad.com and make a new 3D design

4) Import the .svg image and keep it under 1000 mm (I made mine about 120 mm per side).

5) Make a duplicate of the design, and change the fill mode of the duplicate to outer line.

6) Reduce the height of the initial import to a smaller number (I reduced it to 1 mm high).

The design should now appear as a shape with a higher border around it. Group both into one shape.

FYI: The silhouette mode also works, when it is available (depending on the imported shape).

7) Add a Basic Shape ring to the top of the design. . Position it and make sure that the height of the ring is the same height as the trinket.

8) Align the center of the ring with the trinket.

Before aligning

After aligning

9) Group everything and export as an .stl file

10) Open in slicing software (I use Makerbot Print)

AND VOILA

All for Mom

24 Apr 2025 Leave a comment

by CharlesB in 3D design, 3D Printing, 993Q, art, plants Tags: mother's day

The students went to vasedjinn.com and created these models.

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I imported them into TinkerCad to reduce the width of the walls and make a drainage hole. After printing and shipping them to the students, they painted them and then planted little plants inside.

LEGO Robotics to 3D Prints

13 Mar 2025 Leave a comment

by CharlesB in 3D design, 3D Printing, accessibility, autism, code/coding, computer lab, developmentally disabled, Lego, robotics Tags: First Lego League, work flow

I made a work flow to convert the icons used in LEGO Spike and Essentials Robotics programs into 3D prints. The rationale is that some students will benefit from holding the blocks physically in their hands prior to moving them about in the coding programs.

TinkerCad Guitar Sketch

27 Apr 2023 Leave a comment

Here, a student draws on then Scribble Tool in TinkerCAD to sketch the outline of a guitar body. He will create a cookie cutter design, which teacher will print out using the Makerbot Sketch printer, for rock-and-roll-flavored cookies!

Video by CharlesB

3D Printing and TinkerCAD at 79M

24 Apr 2023 Leave a comment

by CharlesB in 3D design, 3D Printing, 79M Tags: Makerbot, TinkerCAD

Enjoy the 3D printing lessons and products from 79M

Bubble Wands at 811Q

13 May 2022 Leave a comment

I brought the 3Doodler printing pens and the plastic filament; the students brought their imaginations and bubble-blowing skills!

The activity started with a demonstration of how the pens work, including how to feed the filament in, how to charge the pens, how to turn them on and off, and how to start and stop the extrusion.

Next, I drew a small rectangle on a piece of paper, to use as a template to trace over with the pen. The melted plastic sticks nicely to the paper, and cools in a couple of seconds, so it can be easily peeled off.

It was the students’ turn. They drew shapes on paper, chose three favorite colors of filament, turned on their pens, and pressed the orange button! The trick to getting the plastic to stay true to a design is to press the end of the pen right onto the paper.

Some students got the gist of it right away and started working on their bubble wands.

Other students designed their favorite characters…Sonic anyone?

The students made a variety of wands, some from their imaginations and some from screen shots of wand designs that I had printed from off the internet. 3Doodler has some great 2D and 3D bubble wand ideas.

Here are wands the students made:

The last step was to go outside to the school yard and test them out. I am happy to report that there was 100% success rate for the bubble wands. We used Five Below bubble solution ($1.00 for a big bottle!) and the kids had so much fun!

Thank you Bonnie Glass for these photographs.

Image by CharlesB

SketchUp Takes Over?

08 Mar 2022 Leave a comment

by CharlesB in 3D design Tags: Sketchup

My intention is to introduce a class to architecture. To that end, I took a second look at SketchUp, the one-time Google-owned modeling program, that now is owned by Trimble. It has been years since I played with SketchUp, at least ever since TinkerCad came around. But still, there may be some architecture-specific things with SketchUp, so maybe I will let the kids have a poke.

The online version is free, with a Google or Microsoft account. Standard right? Well, look at what SketchUp wants with my Google Drive access:

Scary right? So I clicked the little “i” in a circle to get more information…which scared me even more:

Am I overreacting? Is this standard Google permission?

3D Printed Cards for DD

21 Jul 2017 Leave a comment

by CharlesB in 3D design, 3D Printing, developmentally disabled Tags: blind, cardboard

We visited a shop that made concept and object indicators out of cardboard (plus whatever the actual object was). These clever cards can be used as prompts, as labels for storage bins, for the visually impaired, for the developmentally disabled, etc.