Carve a Pumpkin

This is an easy activity to help students learn about 3D printing, planes, and using intrusions.

Students use TinkerCAD for the modelling. They take the pumpkin object and bring it into the field. Students then place a new plane on the side of the pumpkin so they can design their own face to carve out.

Students then use the "Scribble" tool on the new plane to draw their own face for their pumpkin. Once they've drawn the face, students can adjust the size and positioning to fit the pumpkin.

Once the face is positioned, students turn the face into a "hole", drag it through the front of the pumpkin, and "group" the pumpkin and the face together. This results in the pumpkin having the drawn face cut out of it.

Once the model is ready, students or the instructor can prepare it in 3D printing software (we used MakerBot Cloud Print) for slicing and printing. We used 10% infill, 200 micron layer height, and 2 shells.