MPM1D1 - Day 73 Finishing Up 3D Printing

Today we picked up right where we left off yesterday with the pentomino activity. We fired up the 3D printer and started printing right away. Groups that hadn't finished the calculations from yesterday kept working away. They stumbled a little with the different units but eventually most of the groups figured things out. We printed one figure after another but eventually ran out of time. I'll get the others printed at some point.

Once groups were done I gave a review for them to work on to prepare for this week's test. I was hoping to do the test Thursday, but after things didn't go well yesterday I figured they would need an extra day. So, yes we are having a test on the last day before the holidays. It's not ideal, but I figure it's better than doing the test Thursday or after the holidays.

Generally, most students worked well today, either on the pentominoes assignment or the review. There was also a fair bit of excitement when a group's pentomino began printing.

During the printing process today I remembered that prints were not solid plastic. They are infilled with either a hexagonal pattern or a rectilinear pattern. I'll have to do some research to see what percentage we were infilling. This actually adds another layer to the assignment. The more I think about it, the more I think this activity would make a great culminating activity.

MPM1D1 - Day 72 Surface Area, Volume & 3D Printing

I had seven students away yesterday so I spent some time at the beginning of the period recapping what we did yesterday. Once the recap was done we moved right into some volume and surface area.

My own kids have a pentomino based game called Katamino. It's a fun game that really stretches your spatial reasoning skills.

I thought it would be fun to make this game the basis for an assignment. If you don't have the game you could always modify the assignment to work with any pentominoes or even have students build their own figures using linking cubes.

The gist of the lesson is that students get a pentonmino and calculate its surface area and volume. Then they create a scale diagram of a pentomino that is half the size (in all dimensions) of their original pentomino. They calculate the surface area and volume of their model and make note of the relationship between the original and the half-sized model.

They were given the length of a spool of filament (in metres), the diameter of the filament (in millimetres) and the cost of the spool and they needed to determine the cost of their pentomino. Once they had done all of that they designed their pentomino in TinkerCAD. The designing was pretty simple and didn't take long at all. Once their design was complete they were able to print on the 3D printer.

This was meant to be a bit of a fun lesson but for whatever reason many students didn't seem to be into it. I had students working in pairs which is not something we normally do. They also weren't working at the board. Some students spent a lot of time fidgeting with the pentomino (I thought fidget spinners were so last year?), others watched as their partner did the work. One group took 30 minutes just to get their measurements, despite repeated calls to get going. I think next time I need to get groups to do their work at the whiteboards and maybe I need to be explicit about how they could split up their work. Maybe groups of three would have been better than pairs. I'll have to rethink the logistics of this one.

Having said that I had two groups print today. They did a great job and were pretty excited about the result. I had one more group that finished everything except for the printing at lunch. They will print first thing tomorrow. We will finish up tomorrow. I'm looking forward to trying this again to see how it goes.

Here's a description of the task. This task could also be used in an MFM2P class. I've also modified the task to fit the MBF3C course. You can find that here. Here is a link to a quick introduction to TinkerCAD.