6th Grade Bridge Designs - First Attempts

I asked the 6th Grade teacher to help the student submit their bridge designs to me. We didn't think the students would be able to download their work onto Chromebooks and so the teacher had them come to her desk one at a time. The teacher had them log in to Tinkercad and then downloaded their designs as STL files on her computer. Then, the teacher sent me their files so I could print them.

I was impressed with their initial designs. They haven't been taught about the importance of using supports and so they'll be surprised at how much filament the designs with lots of horizontal surfaces will use. I ended up rotating some of the designs to print upside down to avoid needing to use supports, but three of the designs ended up needing supports. I took an X-Acto knife to the ones that needed supports so I could remove all the support materials, but put the material back into place so the students would see how they looked when printed.

I was also pleased that even though each of the designs look pretty good, none of them fit the template perfectly. This means they will all need to go back to the engineering process and tweak their designs.