Perham Eighth Graders 3D-Print Personalized Gifts for School Mentors

Samantha Strandberg spent two days designing a desk organizer in AutoDesk Inventor, then waited for her turn on the Bambu 3-D printer in Andy Paulson's classroom at Prairie Wind Middle School. When the print finally finished, after about 27 hours and two attempts, she hand-delivered it to her former homeroom teacher, Jenni Melvin.

Strandberg's project is one example from Paulson's STEM classes, where eighth graders applied their CAD and 3-D printing skills to design personalized, practical gifts for school staff and mentors. The project was structured to mirror a real-world workflow: students identified a staff member, drafted a professional email to open correspondence, worked out the details of what to make, submitted the design for review by both Paulson and the faculty recipient, and only then moved to the printing phase.

"After learning how to design and print, the students work with staff in our district to design and print something that might help them either in their classroom or in their daily lives," Paulson said. "Each student is required to create a professional style email and create a correspondence with their faculty member and work out all of the details for their project."

The design phase took students about two days. Getting time on the printer was another matter. With an entire class printing simultaneously on the single classroom Bambu unit, access became a genuine bottleneck.

"The toughest part was definitely just getting on the printer because so many people were doing it and there were so many little things that had to be right," Strandberg said.

Her desk organizer required two full print runs before she had a finished product she could bring to Melvin. The process didn't end at delivery, either. Paulson requires students to hand-deliver the finished item in person and take a photo together with the staff member and the object they created, closing the loop between the classroom exercise and the person it was meant to serve.