LIVING TESTIMONIES PROJECT BASED LEARNING 3-D PUZZLES ...

3D Puzzles
By Heather Mantel ‘14
High school. It’s a place where we made thousands of
memories, and made lots of life-long friends. We all have
or have had a favorite class, whether because of the
class itself, the students in it, or if we’re good at it. For me,
technological design, commonly known as drafting, is that class.
Sure, it’s not for all people, but what kid wouldn’t have fun playing
on computers for the entire class?
Student creativity takes shape
In this year’s drafting class, we designed 3-D puzzles on the
program Auto-CAD, and then we all watched in fascinated glee as
a laser moved slowly back and forth across a sheet of plexi-glass,
transxed as we saw our ideas and creativity take shape right before
our eyes. It was a lot of work, and, for me, was very stressful at times.
My group and I made a pirate ship. As we began, we looked online
at pictures of other puzzles, and tried to think of how we could
make something that awesome. We were given a lot of freedom
in how to make them, which was probably why it was so much
fun. We weren’t assigned something to create; we could come up
with an epic structure that was all our own, straight from our own
brilliant minds. We could go as easy or outrageously complicated
as we wanted, and all of the nal puzzles were completely dierent
from each other.
First we drew our ideas on paper, and then split the work up,
taking bits and pieces of the puzzle and working collectively on
Connections
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how to bring the
puzzle to life. With our
ship, I made the hull
of the ship. I designed
ribs to stretch across
the entire thing, and
then made a “spine”
for it. The hardest part
of the entire process
was either guring out
how we could actually
make our idea work,
or having to run back
and forth to our group
members, sharing
ideas or making sure
the pieces t together.
Heather Mantel
Designing the
3D Plexi-Glass Sculptures were
created using Auto-CAD
puzzles took about
seven class periods
to make, and then cutting the pieces out with the laser and
actually constructing them took anywhere from three to ve days,
depending on how complex the parts were and if you had to make
last minute changes, or if you broke pieces and they had to be recut
if you couldn’t glue them back together. We had one pirate ship,
a dragon, a tiger, a bridge and a bi-plane. The nal products looked
amazing, and we were all really proud of how we had actually
managed to create something all on our own. This project was by
far one of the most fun things we’ve done all year.
Publication Agreement No.
40049160