ePublishing 2
3D Printer Help Desk
Jacob McKew, 8th grade
Drakes Creek Middle School
ePublishing
I designed a help desk for the 3D printers at my school. The helpdesk is a website where students can request that their self-made designs be 3D printed. I made this helpdesk because I figured we needed a more organized way to keep track of our list of prints.
I used many programs to make this project such as Tinkerkad as the base website for model submissions. I used Monoprice to slice the models so that they can be printed and I also used Google Sheets as a way to organize the responses for student and teacher print requests. I organized all of these onto a Google Site.
First I set up a Google Site for the website, then I gave it the title, DCMS 3D Printing Help Desk. The first thing students and teachers see is directions on how 3D printing works at my school. Then I began to add things like links to the Google Forms and Google Sheet. The Google Form is where students submit their print and the Google Sheet shows where their project is in the printing process.
We want to encourage 3D printing and tinkering. Students at our school use Tinkercad to design their print. Then I download the STL file and set up the print in Monoprice.
A challenge I faced was communicating with students about when their prints were approved, or ready to be picked up, so I decided to embed the Google Sheet on the help desk and color code all the submissions. This has helped a lot!
Another challenge is that students weren’t submitting their designs correctly. They would copy the website address instead of sharing the design. To help students, I created a video to explain how to upload their Tinkercad model onto the form.
What I like about this project is that it gives a way for students to find something they like such as 3d designing, it helps them try something new and creative. This project helped me learn that nothing comes perfect on the first try, there are going to be hiccups on the way and they can be fixed.