In late 2022, we worked with Camp Hill Primary School on upskilling their senior department staff and students on 3D printing, lending them some of our Up Minis. We were so pleased to receive the following report from Laura, a Camp Hill senior student:

“It was early November when the Camp Hill Senior Department received the news of getting hold of four 3D printers from the Bendigo Tech School. There was a lot of excitement going around about Camp Hill receiving such a device. 

One of our main focuses once we obtained the 3D printers were making name tags (as a gift) for our foundation students. There were a lot of hits and misses during the process of creating the model on a website that was introduced to us called ‘Tinkercad’. We learnt about the design process and that we often need to go back and modify our plans to have a successful print.

Recently we’ve been designing an animal, pet, or item using the 3D printers with a loved one in mind. This model is then manufactured into a gift for that someone special to each one of us. The results have been outstanding and unique. Again the design process came to play – we had lots more times of needing to go back to the drawing stage, fixing up parts of our print that didn’t work the way we wanted.

As much as us Camp Hill students have been focusing on making our models as an assignment, there are also fun ways to create something of our own (or just having fun and printing something useful of our own choice). Once again another site was introduced to us called; ‘Thingiverse’.

Thingiverse is like an online 3D website with a variety of templates and models pre-made for us students to print. We have been able to pick some of these to print for ourselves which has also been fun.

The 3D printers have had an impact on us senior students, it has been fascinating to learn about how they actually work. While the outcomes of each model have not always been appealing to the eye, we have learnt persistence and determination to fix our designs until we get a successful print!

A huge thank you to Ember, Travis and the Tech school for giving us the loan of the 3D printers. We have loved the experience! Our teachers have loved that we have learnt so much and have had so much fun doing it.”

We have a variety of tech available to schools for loan, with fully funded professional development provided to teachers. If your school is interested, please contact [email protected].