It's an OpenSCAD Christmas

thingiverse

These are a few of the Christmas tree ornaments my students created with OpenSCAD this year. It was kind of fun sending my high school students home with ornaments for their trees. They probably haven't brought home ornaments they made in school since the third grade. Overview and Background This was an assignment for my AP Computer Science Principles course. Working through months coding in C can be a bit of a slog. This was a fun activity to break things up a little. Lesson Plan and Activity Students were directed to use OpenSCAD to create Christmas tree ornaments. Their programs needed to include at least one loop and needed to be parametric so that changing global variables would allow the ornaments to be easily customized. We did this lesson near the end of the first semester. Students have been programming in C and have gotten very good at working from programming language references. Consequently, I delivered no instruction in how to use OpenSCAD. I simply pointed them at the OpenSCAD site and turned them loose. One Monday I introduced the lesson and briefly discussed FDM 3D printing. Ornaments were due Friday. Students worked all week. Duration of Lesson One week