Pencil Wind Turbine

thingiverse

This 3D design is based on a project my kid was tasked with in STEM class, which involved building a "pencil wind turbine" to lift a small load using a hair dryer to blow air through the turbine blades. The original project had to be completed using just a pencil and scraps of card or plastic. Although her initial creation worked really well, the flimsy card blades began to bend as soon as we added even a small amount of weight. We took inspiration from this idea and created a 3D model in Tinkercad. While my kid certainly learned a lot from building the original model, this 3D printed version is much stronger and more durable, making it an excellent teaching tool or fun toy for kids to play with afterwards.