Throughout this odd semester, I have learned a lot about 3D printing. While the idea of 3D printing has always interested me, my initial thoughts (prior to my knowledge of this class) were that if I received a 3D printer, I would only print, as I have no artistic talent beyond music. This class has taught me that having no artistic talent can’t hold you back from creating something good to be 3D printed (or I have more artistic talent than I think I do, or both). Below is a showcase of some of the objects I have created throughout my time during this class.

Tinkercad

This was the first design program that we tinkered around with (sorry, I couldn’t resist). It felt comfortable and immediately familiar, mastering this program took no time at all. My final project for Tinkercad, the Alphorn, was not hard to design, but it was most likely the hardest thing I have had to print. 36 pieces in total, I only had to print the last few pieces when the COVID-19 pandemic locked us all into quarantine. The good news is that even though this was my semester on JMU campus (during the fall, I will be student teaching), I plan on purchasing a 3D printer for personal and educational use, after which I will finish this Alphorn for good.

Fusion 360

Wow, this program was complicated. It took a long time to get the hang of this program and create things that I liked with it. While the bugle (pictured above) was my final project for Fusion 360, I would also like to make special mention of the two lightsabers I designed in the program, as the features of this program allowed me to easily create the designs in ways that Tinkercad would have held me back.

OpenSCAD

I had a lot of fun with this program. While I am a music education major, I have been interested in coding and computer science since I was in middle school, so this program is a great match for me. For my final project, I created a parametric mouthpiece for French horn (parametric meaning I can upload it to Thingiverse and I can change the values of the different parts of the mouthpiece before downloading), but I am also proud of this water bottle that I created.

Final Final Project

Since the rest of my final projects were music-related, I thought I would give the final final project the same treatment, but with a bit of a twist. 3D printing has found itself a great place in a special education classroom, as it allows teachers to print specifically-designed tools for students with special needs. Since teaching to students with special needs is a large area of discussion and research within the music education community, I thought I might design something that would enable a student to be more involved in classroom music activities. This led to me creating Boomwhackers, plastic tubes designed to be hit to sound a certain pitch, but with the pitch value written in braille on the tube so that students with visual impairments can more easily interact with the Boomwhackers. I designed this in OpenSCAD to make it parametric and I am very pleased with the results.

Conclusion

Overall, this has been a class that I have really enjoyed, even without access to the 3D printers for half of the semester. This was a class that made me excited to go to the library to work on something. It was a joy to be in.