Students learn, print designs at Maker Space Camp

It did not take students long to learn design skills and more at last week's Maker Space Camp at the Kimball Public Library.

Students learned design work and more at the camp, and their designs were printed out on the library's new 3D printer.

"I think it went pretty well," said Jamie Carpenter, cataloging and technical services librarian and camp director. "I wasn't prepared for how quickly they would move through everything. Overall, they did a great job designing and using TinkerCad, and then working with me to play other games - programming and coding games. They really made some neat designs. I will make some adaptations for next year, but overall it went pretty well."

Students designs ran the gamut of ideas, from animals to a lamp shade to a game piece and more. They made the designs through TinkerCad, an online program which they can also use at home.

"This program is great, because it's free," Carpenter said. "You can use it on these little chrome books. You don't have to download software, you just use it in the web browser. They can log into their account at home, if they have a computer at home."

Ethan Bemis made two designs last week. His first design was a bird and the second design was gyroscope with his initial on it. Bemis said he made the bird design in about 10 to 15 minutes, but the feet broke off when it printed because the plastic was too thin. He hopes so print out his second design this week.

Jessica Williams made a lampshade because she thought the design was cool. The most challenging aspect of the lampshade was the additional plastic needed inside to act as supports.

"I took some holes out of it, but it already had a couple in there," Williams said.

"You need the supports when you're printing anything more than a 45 degree angle, so the plastic...doesn't have anything to print onto. It does these little zig-zag supports to give it some sort of base to give itself support, but then removing them is difficult," Carpenter said.

Students helped Williams break the inner supports and retrieve them, putting them in a bag so the plastic can be melted later and re-used.

Carpenter said special plastic can be purchased that will make printing something like the lampshade easier.

"You can buy special plastic and use your two nozzles, one with support plastic and one with regular," she said. "Then they have certain water soluble ones, so if you set it in a bowl of water, it dissolves. We haven't ordered any of that yet, but we'll see. It would be nice."

The library is also on its second 3D printer after the first one that was purchased had issues. The current printer has worked out better than the first.

"This printer doesn't seem quite as finicky, either," Carpenter said. "The other one, you had to adjust the temperature based on the color you were using. We haven't had so many problems yet with this. Like with the purple that she used for her name, on the first printer, I couldn't get the purple to work at all. It just clogged it up. It worked fine on this one. For some reason, the dye the use affects the melting point. There are a lot of variables, I'm finding out."