When thinking of learning opportunities for Elementary and Middle School students, 3D design and printing is not something that is commonly brought up. However, even if you cannot gain access to a 3D printer, getting your students used to 3D design at a young age would be a vital skill for them to learn for the future. Integrating 3D design into your teaching would help students to cultivate their creative minds and enhance their computer literacy skills. When teaching geometry, or even simple shapes, to learners, teachers can bring in 3D Design to help students understand different shapes and dimensions in a fun and creative way.
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When learning about 3D shapes, many students, including myself, struggle with wrapping their brains around the concept. While you could get a box of 3D shapes out for students to play around with when they are learning about 3D shapes and structures, this is a difficult medium to expand when students require more practice to gain a full understanding of the topic and how they create the structures all around us. You could have the students use Tinker to explore different 3D shapes and see what creations they can create. For older students, you could ask them to create a table, or another object in the classroom, using only the shapes available in Tinker. This would have students work on how they would use the 3D shapes to create everyday objects.
Screenshot of my 3D designs using Tinker
While implementing 3D design and printing in the classroom is a great way to help your students understand, using Tinker is a difficult program to learn for younger students and therefore, it would take time and patience to help the students in feeling confident in using the site. The design that I made in our class time took a long time to properly organize after taking time to understand how Tinker worked. Also, because many schools do not have access to a 3D printer, it may not make sense to have students create a 3D design if their designs cannot come to life. If this method would not work in your classroom, perhaps having students create something in Minecraft or another similar site could work well to support their understanding of the 3D concepts they are learning about. However, I wonder if monitoring their use of these sites may be difficult in a classroom setting. It would be interesting to know if teachers have used Minecraft or another site in their classrooms.