Fix Everything In the School!

thingiverse

3D Printers are amazing at replacing obscure parts on otherwise good items. Is your projector missing a foot? Remote missing a battery door? Has the disc holding the mouseball in place cracked? Print a new one! How I Designed This Example - My mouse (pictured) lost its battery drawer a year ago, and has been held together with tape for this whole time - but a few minutes sketching out the dimensions and a new one is ready to print! Project - Replace Every Broken Item in the School Objectives Students participating in this project will learn the value of items, how to measure and replicate missing items, how to keep an inventory, how to take good notes, teamwork, and how to properly constrain a sketch. Additionally, everyone participating gets the sense of accomplishment at having saved an object from being scrapped out. Audiences Younger and amateur students can help by finding and listing everything broken in the school, along with where these items can be found; intermediate students can measure and suggest how to design replacement parts; expert students can design and print the replacement parts. Preparation Accurate measuring tools and a basic understanding of how to use them are vital to intermediate and expert levels; novices will only need writing materials. Steps This is a small project, best suited to Extra Credit - although if the first student finds enough things to fix, it could well take an entire class of students to design all the replacements! Find everything broken. This would be an excellent example for Delegation - one teacher asks all the other teachers to make a list of what they'd like fixed - or you can send the students out searching. One student or a small team of appraisers go out to catalog everything broken - this can be based on the list from Step 1, or they can hunt them down on their own. More experienced students go through the list and take measurements, sketching out what needs to be replaced (this can be combined with the previous steps based on skill levels). The most experienced students design the replacement parts and print them - subject to the school's union agreement, the school's maintenance person can then install the replacement part. Results A perfect score would be everything replaced in a timely manner with no misprints; how many points that is worth is subject to the teacher's discretion, naturally.