4th Graders Explore Engineering Design Process with Tinkdercad Software and 3D Printers

March 24, 2020

During the past few weeks in science class, fourth graders have been following the engineering design process, competing with their classmates to design and create a boat that will hold the most pennies. In this process students are following the steps: ask, plan, create, test, improve, and present.

Group members first collaborated to draw a 2D sketch in their notebooks of their boats, then they began using Tinkercad, a 3D design platform, to create three-dimensional structures of their sketches.

Once their boats printed on the 3D printers, they began testing the buoyancy of their boats and found that their created boats held between 8 and 81 pennies!