Tinkercad

And the design I was using didn't work for the yoga mat.

So as opposed to like messing around in Blender or like a CAD program, TinkerCAD or whatever to try and fix it.

I just tossed it at Astra and said, fix, I need a radius on this curve to be, you know, 155 millimeters, make it so.

And it did it absolutely seamlessly.

Yeah.

I'm working with my kids in school on Tinkercad, and so that's like-

[laughs]

... you know, the intro thing for kids.

Yeah.

So I walk in with a Tinkercad file.

They try not to laugh, but I'm like, "Come on, I, I, I get it."

Yeah.

And how do you plot that out so that you can make everything

work? We measured it all out on Tinkercad and got it all modeled up and everything.

But to be honest, I think a lot of that is we do a lot of vibe building, right? Vibe building.

So we do a lot of planning, but it still comes down to what we want in the moment.

And, uh, That was the first thought.

And then I went on to a free program online called Tinkercad.

At least that's what it was called at the time.

And yeah, I started kind of modeling what the bottle would look like.

When you do think of a design, what kind of apps or different programs do you suggest for a beginner?

The f- first program that I started learning, and I actually still use to this day for the majority of my designs, it's called Tinkercad.

It's completely online, so you don't need a powerful computer to run it, and it's completely free.

And it's extremely intuitive, so it's basically like digital Lego.

You can just take these basic geometric shapes and combine them together to create what you want.

So for someone looking to get started, I'd definitely recommend checking out Tinkercad.

Over the past few years, 3D printers have really come down in price, but is there somewhere you can go to sort of test one out or play around with one just to get a feel for it before you decide if you're ready to own one?

You'd be surprised.

But, you know, the idea was to come up with a bunch of designs that when kids want to build it, copying is the highest form of flattery, right? If they, you know, they're looking, and then they take it to the event, and it does okay, and they say, well, if I could just change this, and now we've got it, right? And, you know, even with my students, when I had them, you know, when we did Plastic Ant, which was my students, the first thing I had them do was go look at all those designs, do design reviews on all those designs, use that as the basis, Because those designs were largely built by professional builders who had a lot of experience.

Some of the designs were built by, you know, were designed by 10-year-olds in Tinkercad, right? But every one of them came to an event and thought, you know, so that's, The Plastic Ants has been our big focus on getting middle school and high school kids building robots, coming to competitions, and that's the important thing.

Having competitions they can bring their robots to, and they only have to wait maybe four weeks, maybe six weeks to go to a competition, and then the next one is only four or six weeks away.

it creates that continuous improvement iteration thing where, you know, they have just enough time that after it gets destroyed, they can, they can rebuild it.

And so there's so much learning and creativity that can come from that.

And so it's one of my favorite weight classes.

And I think for like even seeing some of Rain's ideas like that he creates because he creates in Tinkercad and he'll come up with a solution that I'm like, oh, that is not what I would have thought of.

Like we're not engineering people.

You're kind of like the Matrix when you see that movie and they can see the little green stuff.

That's me thinking of Tinkercad on how I'm going to build it, you know, or like the signs like right now, what I'm doing with signs.

I'm taking pictures of real signs so I can turn them into my signs.

So I'm getting away from making them.