Design
Inside the print farm: how 3D printing works in class
Eight printers, one queue, and a lot of patience. What happens between a sketch and the object your child brings home.
Our print farm is a room with eight 3D printers and one shelf of failed prints. Students in our design classes send their work here, and older students in the Print Farm Workshop run it themselves. Here's what happens to your child's design.
Step 1: the sketch
Every design starts on paper. Students draw their idea from two sides and write the most important measurements. It sounds old-fashioned, but it saves hours later.
Step 2: the model
Next, they build it in Tinkercad or, for older students, a more advanced tool. The teacher checks two things before anything is printed: will it stand up, and will it fit on the printer?
Step 3: the queue
Designs go into a shared queue. Small prints take twenty minutes. Larger ones can take six hours or more, so they often run overnight.
Each student can have one print in the queue at a time.
Students in the advanced class decide the order and check prints during the day.
If a print fails, the student gets it back with a note about why.
The printer is slow, so plan before you press print.
Step 4: the shelf of failures
Next to the printers is a shelf of prints that went wrong: warped corners, parts that came loose, towers that fell over halfway. We keep them on purpose. Each one has a label explaining what happened.
New students spend a few minutes at the shelf before their first print. It's the fastest way to learn what not to do.
Step 5: taking it home
By the end of term, most students take home two or three printed objects. The first one is rarely perfect. The last one usually is — and your child will be able to tell you exactly why.
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