Session 1 SEP 3D Design

Lots of energy and some familiar faces this past Saturday! And sure enough, when you get a group of sharp minds together, everyone learns something new, even me. In fact, I learned a quick trick that I'd tried to research on the user boards while working on a Tinkercad design project with a new learner. And that is, if you want to keep the color you've chosen per Tinkercad element you've added to your workplane after you've grouped it (which keeps all the elements together so you can move the new grouped object as an entire piece), when you click on the grouped piece and the "inspector" mini-window opens, click on "color" and in the color pallette window that shows up, under the "pre sets" color blocks, you'll see an unchecked box called "Multicolor: preserve original colors in group". Check this! Simple enough.

Other things we learned:

Export to Minecraft: Tinkercad allows you to download a "schematic" file that is Minecraft only readable. This means you have to be logged into your Minecraft account, then access another platform, MCedit, to render this schematic file, a final step that prepares your Tinkercad design for import into your Minecraft world project. This part is a "do at home" project, since Minecraft isn't a browser application, but an actual download that you can only access on a computer where it lives. But, you can certainly use our class time to work on the Tinkercad design, which you can access at home by logging into the SEP account I created for you, or by downloading your Tinkercad .stl file onto a thumbdrive and uploading it to your home computer. Check out this tutorial here for full details.

A bunch of kids are serious Scratch users! Which is exciting, since I teach Scratch and I love to teach cross platform compatibility. And guess what? Many Scratch preloaded sprites are SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). And Tinkercad is SVG compatible. So, this means that you can import some Scratch SVG sprites into Tinkercad and they'll come into your workplane in 3D, which is very cool, since Scratch is 2D. So far, I've found that "Snowflake" and the shadow "Text" letters import without the need to edit them.To do this, in Scratch, add an  SVG sprite to your canvas, then R click>save to local computer. Then, in Tinkercad, on the R side bar where you select shapes, go to "Import" and chose the file you just downloaded from Scratch and in seconds, you'll see the image pop up on your workplane. Now, the Scratch image has to be a native SVG file, which means, you can't convert a bitmap image to SVG, so any custom drawing in Scratch won't work. I know, because I tried, since Scratch does allow you to convert bitmap to SVG, but it seems doing this does not create vectors that Tinkercad requires and if you try to import a converted Scratch SVG file, it will reject it.

For Scratch SVG sprite files that return an error message when you try to upload directly to Tinkercad, open your SVG file in notepad, which will give you the xml programming.  On the very first line in notepad, try pasting this: <?xml version="1.0"?> And sure enough, this seems to take care of stubborn Scratch SVG files that error out at first! Check out SEPScratchNano that I saved as public on Tinkercad. I'm so happy to find a way to work coding into design that gives kids familiar characters to bring from one application to another ;)

Stay tuned to see what more tricks and tips we come up with ...