Let’s start off with a little 3D printing vocab. An object that is 3D printed is
Let’s start off with a little 3D printing vocab. An object that is 3D printed is called a thing. Where do things live? At Thingiverse.com! This website is a treasure-trove of things that other people have designed and are happy to share with you. Things range from the esoteric (yes, I have always wanted a hairy lion) to the celebration of holidays (check out these jack-o-lanterns). Most contributors to Thingiverse allow you to make, share, and adapt their design as long as you give them credit. This is similar to open source software in the sense that people are sharing their ideas for free and contributing to a community. But it gets even better. People don’t just upload their file and say have at it; they take the time to give a description, share photos, include directions, and share tips on how to get your thing printed correctly. As with most social networking sites, you can like a thing. You can also collect it into a saved folder, leave a comment, share a picture and description of the thing you made, watch it in case updates are made, remix it by making changes in some way, and share it with other users. If you are fond of many things that a user makes you can follow them.
Thingiverse was created and is run by MakerBot. There are currently over 739,050 3D models on Thingiverse along with over half a million users. These users range from novices who are just getting started to professionals. You can find simple designs as well as quite complex designs, and everything in between. Almost anything I have thought of printing I have been able to find on Thingiverse. It is user driven so you may come across the occasional design that doesn’t print correctly, but it is also self-correcting in the sense that if this happens other users will comment to let you know.
Now that you are familiar with Thingiverse, you might wonder how this website can be used in a classroom. Maybe your students are just getting started with 3D design and aren’t capable of designing some complex thing, but they may be capable of taking an existing design and remixing it or adding to it. Let me give you an example. One of the activities I designed involves cryptography. I had the idea to use a decoder ring but at the time I was fairly new to 3D design and didn’t have the skills to make the ring spin. I did a quick search on Thingiverse and, sure enough, I found someone had posted a decoder ring. Rather than trying to start from scratch to design a ring, I knew it would be much easier to take this really great ring that somebody else had designed and put my own twist (no pun intended…okay, maybe a little pun intended) on it. I didn’t really need to modify this ring so instead I designed a viewer that would attach to the ring and make it clearer which two letters match up when encoding or decoding a message See here for a full description of this activity.
Let’s assume that you already have your design done. It can be a file you downloaded from Thingiverse or one you create