Tinkercad: Students’ Urban Gardening Designs
One of my favorite lessons I’ve run with middle schoolers is the urban gardening design challenge that a science teacher colleague and I created together. I’ll do a more complete write up of the lesson itself, but I want to feature some student work in this post.
The Challenge
We tasked students with using Tinkercad to create original functional designs that solve some problem with urban gardening, and which can realistically be printed and used in their own home garden either as a completed object, or as a basic but still functional proof of concept that could be scaled up to industrial urban farming. I provided students with a Tinekrcad project that contained models of common gardening objects, demonstrations of design considerations for 3D printing, and my example of a completed project—a fastener that fits over wooden dowels and uses modular bits to hold small diameter irrigation tubes. Here were the constraints for the project:
- The design must be functional, not just aesthetic
- The design should justify the use of 3D printing (i.e., it should not simply be an existing common object that can already be purchased, like a pot or spade)
- A design of a common object is allowed if the student modified it in some significant functional way (i.e., design a self watering pot or a spade that uses an original modular handle system)
- Students could use geometry I provided as examples as a starting point but must able to explain and justify why they chose it and how they modified it
- Maximum dimensions of 10 cm along any edge, or maximum total volume of 1000 cubic cm (this was mostly to make sure I could print all the designs, so I was flexible with this constraint)
- Extra points for modular or stacking designs
Student Work
Here are some of my favorite student designs, the ones that I felt most understood the intent of the project and designed something ambitious. Many of them are modular or stackable pots, or designs that modify an existing pot to make it stackable. The static images don’t do these designs justice, so take a look at them on my Github, where you can rotate them and see how they stack or connect.
