This past December a group of fantastic fifth graders and some super supportive staff members helped me combine some new-to-me tools with amazing results.
We started off by reading Corduroy by Don Freeman and designing 3D buttons with Tinkercad. It was my first time using Tinkercad and Tinkercad's classroom feature. Designing buttons led to some sandbox time designing tags with raised initials. The pre-engineering teacher at our district's career and technology center 3D printed (and videoed the process) for us! The students were so excited to receive their custom tags.
The next thing we read was "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. We looked at several illustrations from different publications. Students then designed their own 3D illustrations of a winter scene using Tinkercad. They exported their illustrations and attached the files to a Google Classroom assignment. I uploaded these files to the Merge EDU platform and added them to a collection.
Our culminating activity involved viewing their illustrations with the Merge Object Viewer app and a set of older iPhones and Merge Cubes. Another fifth grade class joined in on the fun by participating in our gallery walk.
We all learned so much from this experience! The students enjoyed the challenge and so did I.
