Kids code their own 3D creations with new blocks-based design program

Taken from The Hechinger Report

Column by CHRIS BERDIK

On a 

recent Saturday at Einstein’s Workshop, a maker space outside Boston, boisterous kids were busy with Legos, mini motors and gears, magnetic tiles, pipe cleaners, posterboard, markers and tape. In a side room, about a dozen elementary and middle school students were learning computer-aided design (CAD) for 3D printers. Their instructors shut the door, but couldn’t completely keep out the creative chaos. Nor did they want to.

Like all educators mixing high-tech with hands-on, they faced a familiar challenge—the freewheeling, playful problem-solving that comes naturally to kids using blocks or craft supplies isn’t easily replicated with a computer. A few years ago, when the folks at Einstein’s Workshop bought their first 3D printer, the available CAD software seemed either too technical for young kids or too simplistic, with limited flexibility for faster learners or more advanced students.

With BlocksCAD, you create, combine and manipulate 3D shapes by stacking “block” commands rather than by typing in precise coding syntax. For example, you can drag a block command for a sphere from the shapes menu into the workspace, where you can adjust its radius. Snap on a “translate” block to move the sphere along the X, Y and Z axis, or add on a “rotate” block to spin it. Use a color block to change its hue. Hit the “Render” button, and the sphere appears within a maneuverable XYZ grid. Finished designs can be sent to a 3D printer that will fabricate them layer by layer.

BlocksCAD benefits from students’ growing familiarity with block-based computer programming languages, starting with Scratch, developed about a decade ago at MIT. Millions of kids as young as kindergarten-age have used Scratch to learn the basics of coding and computational thinking, thanks to initiatives such as the Hour of Code. Another Scratch sibling popular with educators, called App Inventor, is used for programming mobile apps.

“When my students first opened up BlocksCAD, they said, oh, this is just like Hour of Code,” said Courtney Bedzyk, one of three middle-school science teachers in Hudson, Ohio, whose students used BlocksCAD this spring to design amusement park rides for a unit on electricity, magnetism, gravity and force diagrams. For Bedzyk, combining the exposure to 3D printing with computer programming is an educational twofer.

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