Class Calendar
Earlier in the year, our class designed, printed, and painted a calendar to be used in the classroom. After a few years of using my terrible penmanship to write the date on the board every morning, I decided I wanted something more professional-looking that would include user-friendly, interchangeable, 3D-printed calendar plates.
To build this calendar, we needed:
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​Months of our school year (September-June)
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Days of the week (Monday-Friday)
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Year plates (2022-2023)
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The numbers 0-9
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The word "Day" (our school has a 10-day cycle)
​Overall, the whole set took about 12 hours in total to print.
The Process:
First we had to design the plates completely from scratch using Tinkercad. We wanted the letters to be imprinted, rather than raised, in order to make them easier to paint afterwards. Once painted, we needed a way to hang the calendar on the wall. We thought about printing a wall-mounted bracket that would allow us to simply slide the plates in and out each day, but with so many different plates needed to show the complete date (6 in total), we decided that Velcro would be the easiest solution, so we attached pieces of Velcro to the back of each calendar plate. The final step was to print something to organize and hold the calendar plates we made. We found an awesome cup design on Thingiverse.com, and we printed two cups, along with a basket we designed from scratch on Tinkercad.
Problems We Were Able to Troubleshoot:
Initially, we printed the plates with a height of 0.5 cm, but we found that the back of the plate was peeling off because of how close the imprinted letters were to it. So we made a small adjustment and gave the plates a height of .75 cm, which worked perfectly.
Final Thoughts:
I liked this project because I was able to get the whole class involved. We had designers, printer runners, painters, glossers, velcro cutters, and organizers. This took about 4 school days to complete so it was a great “weekly” task. The only thing I would change would probably be to use a brighter shade of red to print with, as it’s harder to see the calendar when the lights are off in the classroom.
Links and Products used:
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Cup Design: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4860154
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We used "www.tinkercad.com" to create our calendar plates and our basket holder.
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We used "Ultimaker Cura" as our slicer to adjust and customize our print files.
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We used an Ender 3 V2 to 3D print our designs