Last month our Curriculum page had a new idea for every school day in September, running the spectrum from MakerBot-made tweezers to a foldable fan.

This month, Liz Arum (@lizarum) has put together a brand new batch of daily tips, this time in tutorial form. Win!

Follow along this week for some excellent guidance on using Tinkercad, one of our favorite tools for getting novices started with 3D design. Today, Liz shows you how to upload STL files directly into Tinkercad, a relatively new feature. This is great for taking something you like from Thingiverse and using it as a starting point.

Personal note: I had forgotten all about this capability in Thingiverse, so this was a helpful reminder. Nice! Tomorrow, Liz will walk us through making mashups in Tinkercad.

There’s a lot more to come with the Daily Tutorials, so stay tuned. Same Bot time, same Bot channel.

Pocket-Dungeons by dutchmogul

If you haven’t checked out Thingiverse citizen dutchmogul’s Pocket-Dungeon playset, you need to stop what you’re doing and check them out on Thingiverse right now.  This totally modular set was designed in TinkerCAD, a free online and easy to use CAD website that allows you to share directly to Thingiverse.  What I like about this little set is that I could see myself having as much, or even more, fun putting together a dungeon layout as I would have playing the game itself.  Each of these intricate little pieces was printed on their MakerBot Replicator at 0.1mm layer height – which means you can really see all their little design details.  My personal favorites are the little creatures wearing cloaks.

And, if strategy games are more your thing, you might want to check out their Pocket-Tactics playset too!  For more photos, rules for each game, and information about dutchmogul’s sets you can also check out their blog at IllGottenGames.com.

Untitled by dutchmogul

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Untitled by dutchmogul

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There is still time to enroll your child in a very important learning opportunity, and good news: the price has dropped and the eligibility has expanded!

NYU Poly’s Center for K-12 STEM Education and MakerBot are combining powers to get kids introduced to 3D modeling and 3D printing. This is an excellent chance to give them a leg up with a set of skills that will become very advantageous in the near future.

Here are the details:

Where: NYU-Poly Campus
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY
Room RH 214

When: July 9th-13th, 2012 from 9am to 3pm daily

Who: Ages 10-13

Cost:  $500 $400/student (includes a lunch voucher good in our cafeteria)

Email [email protected] to find out more.

Click here to sign up!

If you’re a parent in the New York City region, take a look at this great summer workshop being organized by NYU Poly. “On the Move” is a week-long program targeted to students entering 6th, 7th, and 8th grades in the fall, and it is focused on 3D modeling and 3D printing. These are the skills that will set the next generation of creative kids apart from their peers. Get them started now!

We’re especially proud to recommend this program, since the MakerBot Education Team, Liz Arum and Jon Santiago, will be leading the instruction. Here’s some info from the website.

This workshop will focus on 3D Printing, one of the most disruptive technologies around. 3D printers allow anyone at any skill level to become producers, inventors and artists, and they are changing the way we create and learn.  During this one-week intensive workshop students will learn how to make and personalize 3D models with free, readily available software like Tinkercad, OpenSCAD and Blender. Our theme will be “On the Move,” and we will be focusing on making gears, interlocking parts and other physical mechanisms to make our creations, walk, shake, dance and fly. No prior modeling, computer or printing experience is necessary.

Where: NYU-Poly Campus
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY
Room RH 214

When: July 9th-13th, 2012 from 9am to 3pm daily

Cost:  $500.00/student (includes a lunch voucher good in our cafeteria)

Questions? Email Susan Hermon at [email protected]

A lot of the pictures and shots from Maker Faire last weekend hit the cutting room floor, but we wanted to share them with you to give you a feel for the environment. Saturday and Sunday were two action-packed days as you can see. Read the rest of the post to find out who else made MakerBot a part of their booth in order to show off their own technology or just the joy of Making.

Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 has been an incredible event, not just for the 100,000 or so people who came through here — still waiting for the official figures! — but also for the Makers. It’s been a weekend full of weirdness, magic, and…drama!

Here’s the scene: a middle school boy goes to a fantastic summer day camp, Galileo Learning, in Hillsborough, CA. He builds a great go-kart as his final project. But when Galileo transports the go-kart to Maker Faire, the steering wheel is dangling by a single bolt. Missing a nut!

The boy in our story, Adam, is a maker. He saw this problem and went out to fix it. When you’re at Maker Faire, you can probably find someone with the right size nut, right? Surely Tech Shop has one on hand.

Nope! Adam walked around the floor looking for a solution, and then… OH YEAH!

You can make the things you need! Over at the Tinkercad booth, Adam discovered that company’s incredible web-based design platform, and worked with the brilliant Henrik to draw out the right part. And since Tinkercad had a MakerBot right there on the table, he was able to make it on site in a matter of minutes. Shino writes over at the Tinkercad blog that the whole process took 45 minutes, beginning to end. Whoa.

Adam watches as The Replicator makes a part for his go-kart

Installing the nut, designed on Tinkercad

Thanks to the cooperation of friendly people in the Faire, Adam was able to slap the new part onto his go-kart and show his finished product how it was meant to be seen. As soon as we heard the story, we zoomed over to find him and decked him out with a MakerBot t-shirt and Awesome Award.

This is one rad kid, and I was so happy to hear his story, and he was happy to talk about it. Any teachers or parents out there wondering if kids really understand the power of being able to make things for themselves on a MakerBot, here’s a great example to remember.

Thanks for making our Maker Faire, Adam! And thank you to our great friends at Tinkercad for empowering kids the way they do.

World, you need to be following the developments of Joe, who is now a fully fledged MakerBotter.

Joe, or Cymon on Thingiverse, was the winner of the Tinkercad Chess Set Design competition, for which we awarded him The Replicator.  And now he’s on the way toward making his famed Action Chess set!

As you can see, the sweet thing about this chess set is that the pieces are designed to assemble into this chess giant. Now that Joe has had a chance to test his design, he’s reporting success! The pieces do in fact assemble, but he says there’s a bit of calibration and fine tuning left.

Hyperboloid pencil holder by MakeALot

Tinkercad just profiled a cool MakerBotter: Thingiverse user MakeALot, who also occasionally goes by the name Mark Durbin. You may remember Mark as the creator of the Amsterdam House chess set, which took Second Runner Up honors in the recent Tinkercad design challenge.

Go have a read! But also note that Mark’s “house backs onto fields which often contain cows, horses and even sheep, sometimes; you look into the back garden and appear to have a herd of cows.”

I love the idea of a MakerBot printing away out in the pastures. This makes me want to see a picture of where each of your Cupcakes and Thing-O-Matics and Replicators sit in your home or office. If you’ve got a photo, send it over!

There was a really nice set of responses to a post last week about sketching. Basically, I asked whether blog readers and MakerBot operators were accustomed to sketching their designs from the very beginning or using CAD tools to 3D model a design from the get go.

I just thought the responses deserved a quick recap, especially because they underscore the point that there is no right answer. As someone who jumped into this company with no background in 3D printing or any other hardware hacking, I have been continually surprised how accessible the concepts are. I think it’s nice to point out that those of you who do such great work all also have varying processes — so the results aren’t just individualized, the process is too.

The star of today’s episode of MakerBot TV, Kacie Hultgren (aka PrettySmallThings), said that the sketching stage is often absent from her work; not because she eschews pencil and paper, but because much of what she does comes from photographs. It’s pre-sketched, in a way.

Emmett, whose Things number among the most notable contributions in the Thingiverse, similarly doesn’t sketch much. But in his case, it’s because his “imagination works in 3D already.” Communicating an idea to someone else, however, deserves a sketch. Renee  not only sketches, but cleans that sketch up in Illustrator before bringing it into a modeling environment.

The creator of MakerBot mascot R.Maker (pictured above), ErikJDurwoodII, said he sketches to lend some purpose to the CAD process, even if that sketch will change over time, and Gregg Wygonik also uses sketching to make sure the computer phase doesn’t include avoidable elements that cause discouragement. (Visit Gregg’s Thingiverse page here.)

Stephen Holmes, who writes for Develop3D, pinged us on twitter with a really relevant article showing yet another mindset: 3D sketching. The people at the UK product design consultancy 3form Design (3fD) do specifically leave pencil and paper sketching out of their process. Founder Austen Miller argues that the “reverse engineering” required to take a designers sketch on paper into the domain of the engineer can cause the loss of original design intentions. Instead, the groups designers start in SolidWorks.

Echoing what our commenters said:

Miller doesn’t succumb to the argument that by jumping straight into CAD stifles creativity. In his opinion, just like pen and paper, CAD is a tool and depends whose hand it’s in as to the end result. “Creativity should not be measured by the medium we choose but how successful we can be with it…”

Thanks, all, for the input!

Remain calm. This is just a video of adorable, 3D-modeling-and-3D-printing-savvy children designing a pendant in Tinkercad and printing it on a MakerBot Replicator. While surrounded by copies of Arduino Cookbook. So I suppose the phrase Happy Monday means something now.

For more videos from Osamu Iwasaki’s, which pretty much run the gamut of everything, here’s his website.