Products · The Course
Three units. About twelve hours. From first sketch to working assemblies.
The 3D Design and 3D Printing course teaches students to design their own objects in Onshape and produce them on a 3D printer. Every lesson is self-paced and step-by-step, with short videos at each stage and customization challenges to unleash your creativity.
Curriculum
The units
Unit 1 — The basics of 3D modelling
Students set up their tools, then learn to sketch, dimension and extrude. They design and print a smiley face and a personalised bag tag, and learn how print settings like infill and brim change the result.
Project: design a phone stand.
Skills: line, circle and text tools, dimensions, constraints, extrude, fillet, chamfer, exporting, slicing, infill, brim.
Unit 2 — Advanced modelling and manufacturing
Students move to precise geometry and more complex forms — revolve, construction lines, patterns, splitting parts, and designing with printability in mind. They make a vase, a UFO spinning top and a chess piece of their choosing.
Project: design a custom lightsaber hilt.
Skills: revolve, trim and extend, construction geometry, hole tool, circular pattern, split, thicken, spiral vase mode, multi-part printing.
Unit 3 — Assemblies, tolerances and moving parts
Students learn to combine parts into working assemblies, control movement with mates, and apply tolerances so printed parts actually fit. They build a telescoping lightsaber blade, a storage container with a removable lid, and a bed scraper they’ll use on their own printer.
Project: design a desk organizer sized around your own belongings.
Skills: assemblies, fastened and slider mates, tolerances, draft, shell, boolean operations, offset planes, mirror, linear pattern, designing in context.
Roadmap
Coming next
Unit 4 — Technical drawings. Communicating a design the way engineers do.
Unit 5 — Joints and movement. Fidget toys, flexy animals, springs and compliant mechanisms.
Format
How a lesson works
Every lesson opens with what you’re making and why. Steps are short and each one explains the reasoning, not just the click. Short videos show the tricky parts. Vocabulary is defined as it appears.
The software
Built on Onshape
We teach Onshape, not a simplified modelling toy.
That’s a deliberate choice. Block-based and beginner tools are easier on day one, but the skills don’t transfer anywhere. Onshape is a professional parametric CAD used across industry and by FIRST and VEX robotics teams — and it’s free for students and educators, runs in a browser, and works on a Chromebook.
For teachers
Teacher resources
Every lesson has a companion resource for the teacher: the answers, the places students commonly get stuck, how to help without doing it for them, and the vocabulary introduced. Plus a Getting Started guide and lesson-by-lesson standards alignment.
Requirements
What you need
A computer with a web browser for Onshape — Chromebooks included. A Windows, Mac or Linux machine for Orca Slicer, which prepares files for printing. And any 3D printer.
Alignment
Standards
Mapped lesson by lesson to ISTE Standards for Students 1.1, 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6, and to the four K–12 Computer Science Framework practices. Full matrix available on request.