Tinkercad

My son's class is doing a secret gift swap next week with the students and teachers in his classroom.  Some of the students coordinated the event and my son was excited to come home yesterday with Ms. Alison, the assistant teacher, as his secret person.   

There are some rules about your gifts.  First of all, don't tell anyone who you have.  Second, the gift must be made by you.  And third, it should be in a brown paper bag and brought to school with the recipient's name on it on Wednesday of next week.   

I thought it would be a good opportunity to give my son a lesson in Tinkercad, an online 3D modeling tool that easily lets you create things that can be 3D printed.   The tool is targeted at children, although both my husband and I use it because it's so simple and straightforward that creating things in it is quick and easy.   It doesn't have as robust a collection of tools and features, but we're not doing things that merit that level of sophistication yet. 

My son did the bit where he rebels, makes excuses and throws a fit because he doesn't want to do something new.  Once I got him understanding that there was not going to be a choice, he sat down and proceeded to get the program and its features faster than I could teach it to him. 

Ms. Alison has several things she likes, but KitKat bars was, by far, the easiest to model.   I showed him where to find the shapes and helped place a trapezoid on the build area.   While I was looking up the dimensions of KitKat bars, my son was adding elements, scaling things, rotating other things, putting text on things and generally investigating the program. 

He got the modeling so quickly that once I showed him how to size and position the first long, thin tetrahedron that makes up one of the KitKat bar segments, he finished the remainder of the four-bar shape hiself.   

I taught him about grouping and merging objects.   Then I told him you could subtract material too.   We created some text saying, "Happy Holidays" and then set it into the bar.   With one click, the words were subtracted from the model and it looked like writing on a candy bar.  

He finished off the words and then added a moustache to one of the middle segments and sunk it into the chocolate area.   We saved the file in printable format and he picked out a color of filament he thought woudl be good for a Kitkat bar.  I told him the model would be ready in the morning and we could work on the next model tomorrow night. 

The Big Boy Update:  In a hour my son will be ten-years-old.  For eleven months, I'll have children of different ages.   Tomorrow will be a decade since I had children.   That really does not compute in my brain. It can't be that long ago.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is much more interested in what happens in cars after the colision.   She asks, "what was that," "why did you brake just then," and other questions that indicates she's paying more attention than she has in the past.   She's not having PTSD, she's just suddenly more aware.   It helps her understand what's happening when the driver drives a car.   Up until now sometimes I think she just pictures us in the car and had little mental image of what happened outside it's walls.