HUDSON, N.H. – Students in Michael Motherway’s Pre-Engineering class at Hudson Memorial School are learning how to push the envelope and discover new possibilities through 3D printing.
Motherway, who is in his second year teaching in Hudson after spending 19 years in the North Andover, Mass. school system, utilizes Tinkercad, a 3D digital design platform to teach his students. Motherway can assign a variety of assignments for students to complete with the software, including creating prosthetic hands.
“They’ve been working through a sequence of lessons,” said Motherway. “They’re trying to get to the ball hinge. We gave them a tutorial for it, and we will see if they can print it and it moves. Once we can get the fingers to move, then we think about how to make them work on a hand. So, they made the hand shape and put their fingers on it.”
Creativity is required to complete these assignments, as the answer often needs some outside-the-box problem-solving. In the case of the prosthetic hand, a certain stretchy material had to be implemented to gain functionality.
“I put a lot of rubber bands on it to make the hand stretch back and forward,” said sixth-grader Evan Regan. “I went through four or five different prints to get it to this point. I just like making different kinds of things.”
With Tinkercad, students have a lot of choices in terms of what they can do with the layout of the software.
“There are several shapes and categories to work from and you also have a search option if you don’t know what category it’s in,” said sixth-grader Bradley Gonthier. “You can stretch it in any direction, change the properties of the shape, and pretty much do anything until you’ve made what you want.”
Gonthier and classmates Abel Arsenault and Zachary Patmos created an entire set of chess pieces in the class to play against each other. They also found a way to recreate some more popular cartoon characters.
“With these, the concepts are the same, but they’re putting their own spin on it,” said Motherway. “They started modeling it and working on it, then they were making the minions [from the Despicable Me franchise] and SpongeBob, and we gave them tutorials for that and they made different expressions for the characters.”
Motherway’s classroom has 3D printers at their disposal for the students to utilize. The printers are often in use during class time and some of the projects take multiple hours and can even require overnight time to complete.
Students in the class can also be found enjoying pieces to an air hockey table that were made and past projects also include cell phone holders and recreating popular brands’ logos.
Opportunities expand past the class as well, as students in his class also take part in HMS’s robotics club, which allows more time and access for their creativity to be put on display.