LEGO 3D Design Challenge

By Megan Barrett, Information & Technology Literacy Specialist, Cuyahoga County Public Library September 30, 2018

Over the course of three, one-hour sessions, participants built their own landmark out of LEGO bricks, designed a custom brick using the 3D design software Tinkercad, and had a chance to adjust their design. This was a great way to show participants how 3D design can be useful when prototyping.

This program works for late elementary and middle school.

Tags: 3d design, 3d printing, Lego, Stem

Type: Active
Age: Late elementary
Optimal size: 11-20
Estimated cost: $100+
Planning time: 2-5 hours
Frequency: One-time

Learning outcomes

Participants will learn about 3D design and create their own custom LEGO brick using Tinkercad software.
Participants will learn about prototyping. During the multi-session program, participants will have a chance to create two iterations of their custom LEGO brick.
Participants will build critical thinking and problem solving skills by designing a custom LEGO brick to improve their landmark.

Instructions

Equipment & Materials:

Laptops: one per participant
3D printer
Projector
LEGO bricks
Books/pictures of famous landmarks

Session One:

Talk to participants about different landmarks. Invite participants to create their own landmarks out of LEGO bricks. Have books/pictures on hand to provide inspiration, if needed.

Talk with participants about how a custom-created LEGO brick could help with building. For instance, if you were trying to build the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it would be helpful to have a slanted LEGO brick.

Invite participants to build their own landmark with some standard LEGO bricks. Ask the participants to start thinking about how they could customize their own LEGO brick to better build their landmark.

Session Two:

Review session one. Introduce the Tinkercad software. As a group, show the participants how to do the following things in Tinkercad:

Create new design
Using Shapes:
- Dragging shapes onto the Workplane
- Moving & Rotating shapes
- Adjusting size
- Duplicating shapes
- Deleting shapes
Camera controls
Making Holes
Grouping & Ungrouping

After giving an overview of Tinkercad, give the participants time to design a custom brick. It can be helpful to provide the participants with a template for the basic LEGO square brick and rectangle brick. Here are links to .stl file templates:

Square Brick Template

Rectangle Brick Template

Session Three:

Between sessions two and three, print out each participant’s design on a 3D printer. Review session two and introduce the concept of prototyping. Give each participant their printed brick. Have them test out their brick to see if it works the way they had envisioned. If not, give participants a chance to adjust their designs in Tinkercad.

If participants are satisfied with their designs, they can rebuild their landmarks with their new custom bricks.

After session three, print any new or adjusted designs.

Evaluation

Figuring out the correct length of time for each session was the biggest challenge. We didn't need the whole 60 minutes for session one. For session two, 60 minutes was too short. Next time, I'd probably adjust the activities for each session.