3d Printed Car’s
In drafting 9 this semester one of the projects we did was a balloon powered car we made with the 3d printers. It was a fun project because we finally got to use the 3d printers after a few months which was nice. My cars didn’t go to far the first one got an average of about 0.7ish centimetres with the second one going like 1 centimeter other than that it was a pretty fun project. I really liked making my own car (even though it only went 0.5ish centimetres) i really like making things from scratch and not having an instruction booklet or anything. This was a good project to teach people how to use the 3d printers I liked using the printers so much i put one on my Christmas list.
Wind Turbine’s
Another project we did in drafting this semester was wind turbines. What we had to do was design wind turbines and then we had to print them out on the 3D printer. After that we had to put them in a wind chamber and see how much power it generated. The first one i made generated around 4 watts of power the second one did around 3. after we got the readings for the turbines we had to calculate how much money it could generate within a year. mine would’ve made only 2 or so cents a year so it wasn’t that great of a design. I really liked this project because we got to use the printers more and there was some trial and error which i really like in a project. I liked this project more than the 3d cars because we got to make both of them from scratch unlike the cars were we only made one of them.
Cardboard boat’s
A few week’s ago we made cardboard boat’s and raced them at Hyde Creek. First we made miniature 3d printed boat’s and tested how much weight they could hold via putting penny’s into the boat, then we were given some cardboard and made some mini cardboard boats and then did the same thing. Then we made different design’s if we wanted to for the actual boat. And next we went to Hyde Creek and built the normal version’s and then we raced them. It was a really fun project that we did one of my favorites.
Passion project
The purpose of my project is to help new students get around the school and not get lost as easily. I built a 1:1 replica of the school into Minecraft. It’s basically just a 3d map for new students to use to get around the school without getting lost. I will try to get the world download up on the school’s website if possible. I used many elements of STEAM. I will be using Math for measuring the school and converting it into Minecraft blocks. I will be using art because this whole thing is just a really big art project. I will be using Technology because it’s online. And I will be using Engineering because it’s also building a model of something. This project is interesting for me because I love building stuff in Minecraft, and I also really wanted to get something from real life into Minecraft. This project is important to me because I really love Minecraft, it’s one of my favorite games and I always love it when there’s a project based around it.
How did I build TFHS in Minecraft? It was not an easy task, I had to try three different strategies before I even attempted building. First, I sent an email to the city asking for plans of the school, but they needed me to get someone at the Sd43 office to verify that I am authorized to have the plans and not just a random person who wants the plans. Unfortunately, no one emailed me back so that plan got nowhere. The method that worked was using google earth’s ruler tool to measure the outside length and width of the school for the outside of the building, and a map Mr. Star (the principal) gave me for the classrooms.
I started with the outside of the building first because I had the most accurate measurements for it. As I stated previously there’s a really cool feature on google earth that allows you to measure the distance of an object or between an object. The exterior took around a month or so to complete.
After I got the exterior and classroom walls done, I started work on the interior, this was probably my favourite part of the project, because I was able to use these things called display entities. Display entities are these things in the vanilla version of Minecraft and can be summoned by a command, they let you change the dimensions of a block whether it be making it taller longer or thicker. I mainly used display entities for the small details of the school like the computers in the media arts room or the desks/tables.
In case you didn’t know 1 cubic meter in real life is one block in Minecraft so that’s the scale factor I used. The Building Process for the project was really repetitive but it would have taken much longer if I didn’t use a mod called AXIOM. Axiom Is a mod that doesn’t add anything to the game, it just makes building in Minecraft easier, there’s an extrude feature where you can extrude or shrink a whole row of blocks instead of building them out individually one at a time. They also make display entities easier to use/summon, all you have to do is open the menu hit display entities chose your block and your done.
But this project was no easy task it came along with many struggles, challenges, and problems I had to overcome. This project came along with so many problems and setbacks that if I had a nickel for every time I had to rebuild a certain wing of the school or restart, I’d have too many to make the reference. Some of the problems included my math with the scale factor being wrong and thinking one of the walls were on an angle because I was using a bird’s eye view of the school with google earth, when it was really just the roofline I screwed up. I wanted to quit so many times, but I sucked it up and pushed through the mental pain the project was giving me. I’m just as surprised as you are that I finished the project on time.
This project has had it’s fair shares up’s and down’s, but all in all it was a pretty fun project (after I got the exterior and classroom blueprints done.) It was a project that pushed my creative thinking to the max and made me understand why buildings take so long to build, I barely got this done by the deadline and it wasn’t even a real-life building! We will never know but it probably would have been so much easier if I had the actual plans of the school. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a well-deserved nap.
