3D Printing Revitalizes Montessori School’s Hands-On Alphabet Set

From 3DPrint.com

by Debra Thimmesch | Mar 9, 2016

Danish expat, Washington, D.C.-area resident, and maker Mathias Hansen put his many tech-related skills to work in the interest of making learning the alphabet more fun for young Montessori school students. Montessori schools are all about hands-on learning. Hansen, an accomplished software engineer at VideoBlocks, an online company that provides creative content–graphics, video, and audio–at affordable prices, recently fielded a question about how to revitalize an old hands-on alphabet set. Hansen recalled the initial engagement:

“I got an interesting question from a Montessori school recently. They had this material that consisted of a big box with a slot for each letter in the alphabet. Unfortunately many of the letters had gone missing over time, and they now no longer had the complete alphabet.”

It probably goes without saying that it’s pretty hard to make much with your ABCs if you have an incomplete set. Hansen suggested in response to the query that 3D printing would provide a quick and “relatively simple” solution to the problem of the missing letters. He found out later that, indeed, it was a simple enough solution although somewhat time consuming in the end.

Hansen began the project by taking a picture of the wooden alphabet box using his phone camera. The shape of each letter was already painted on the alphabet box, so Hansen decided to use the preexisting letter shapes to create his 3D models.

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