Stepping Forward: 3D Printed Shoes

My high school kids have been printing their own shoes lately.  For the last month, students in my class have been using TinkerCad to create a shoe that they actually have to wear.  That's correct, the students have to wear a shoe.  Not only do they have to wear it, but they have to walk in the shoe as well.  This brings up all sorts of new issues like stress tests. 

Although this project seems rather straightforward, there are some hurdles that students had to think about.  First of all, some of the boys where size 12 shoes or above.  The Dremel IdeaBuilder 3D40 doesn't really support a shoe of that size, so this led to many of the boys finding girls in the class who had smaller feet.

The students got one attempt at printing this.  This is because many of these shoes are 16+ hour prints.  This brings up new issues, such as filament run out, power outages, etc.  The students also had to make sure their models did not have any unnecessary gaps, and they had to think of where to add supports to their models if needed.  Last, but not least, they had to think about their models and think of where new stresses are added to the model in order for them to walk in it.

This project was a lot of fun.  The majority of the students were successful in building their working models, and the students all enjoyed seeing what they printed out.