Can anyone use this service?
Great question! We make ourselves available to all South Bergen Jointure Commission classrooms, as well as any teachers belonging to our participating sending districts (Becton, Bogota, Carlstadt, East Rutherford, Garfield, Hasbrouck Heights, Little Ferry, Lodi, Lyndhurst, Moonachie, North Arlington, Rutherford, South Hackensack, and Wallington).
How often are we allowed to use the WorkShop?
We're here to work for you. Our services will be made available to you as often as you need them.
How do I design 3D objects?
To the right you'll find our YouTube Playlist for designing in Tinkercad. We'll continue to update and expand our favorite videos throughout the school year.
What if I want to 3D print something for personal use?
At this time, we ask that everything we print be used for you be for educational purposes.
Why did my 3D design not print correctly?
3D design involves learning, and seeing a fault 3D print is one of the most important steps that we'll never take away from the learning process. Whatever you send to us, we'll print, even if it doesn't appear just as you thought it would.
With that being said, there are a lot of things to take into account when you're designing in three dimensions, but the most important is understanding gravity. Think of 3D printers as fancy hot glue guns. You can adhere to a surface, then build layer upon layer. However, if there is no bottom layer for the filament to adhere to, then you get some serious droops and what looks like a bird's nest. There are a few ways to work around this: learn about overhangs and how to design with them in mind, and also understand that you can design and print in sections. Your 3D design doesn't have to be one whole piece, but instead can be a series of pieces to be assembled in the post-production phase.
What's the best way to make a poster?
Our most recommended method of designing a poster is using the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop or Illustrator). However, you can also design posters using free platforms like Google Slides. Look at our Resources Section to find out how to design posters in Google Slides. 24" or 36" wide is the optimal poster size for our HP z3200 printer and HP T2500 printer.
How should we send you our paper media files?
After designing your poster, save it as a PDF. This will make certain that nothing gets distorted and your selected fonts remain the same (a font not in our system could change to Comic Sans, which would be disastrous!). Also attaching a screenshot of how the poster looks on your computer will help us make sure we're printing exactly what you want.
Can we borrow more than 6 kits from the Lending Library?
We don't have an endless supply of kits, but we do want to share them with as many classes as we can. If they are available, additional kits can be borrowed. Please email us at workshop@njsbjc.org following the completion of filling out the lending library order form.
What kits do you have available in the Lending Library?
You can view our Lending Library Catalog to see what we have, or you can visit our "What's in stock at our Lending Library?" spreadsheet to see what's available.