How to use with Tinkercad 3D Designer

hi there jamie keate here today at teachers tech hope you're having a great day today today i want to show you how to use tinkercad now as an edtech coach i get to show hundreds of kids this program every year and they range from 70 year olds all the way up to 18 year olds so this could be shown for a number of reasons maybe they're getting into 3d printing or they're just doing 3d design and there's so much creativity that can go in with using tinkercad now i'm going to show you a basic tutorial to get started to get logged in so you can show your kids how to be using this in this tutorial today but the possibilities are endless the creativity with tinkercad so tinkercad is free to use and it's just at tinkercad. com and i'll put the link down below so you can quickly go to it and i'll timestamp everything in this video so if you're looking for something in particular you can jump right to it and at the end of this video i'll get i'll just do a little quick uh show of how to set up your classes if you're a teacher uh on how you would do that but i'm gonna go get logged in with my account

right now if you don't have an account you can hit join now and then just follow the uh with the prompts that it has to do it's very simple to set up an account but i'm going to hit sign in and i'm just with google and get to my account so now i'm logged into my tinkercad account and just to give you a little

walk around this screen right here what you're seeing you can see my recent designs these are just different ones i've shown i can go back at any time and edit it and edit any of these that ones i've already started just by hitting tinker this and they'll go in and i can also delete any of these too so if i click on the little settings i can see how i have delete and then it's gone so i can also share to other people i'll talk about that a little later you can see on the left here i'm going to be focused on 3d design and basic shape manipulation in this one but there's other ones from circuits to cold blocks and we even have some lessons but i won't look and be looking at that in this tutorial right now i'm going to go ahead and create a new design

right here and when i uh notice uh i just want to point out it gives you a name of the design right here so now it says brave dancers just kind of random names

i can go ahead and click in here and i can i'm just going to say demo one and that gives me a name here so i don't have any anything on this it's just a work plane this work plane i can be looking at it from all these different angles and i'm just gonna put an uh shape on here a basic shape and if i look over to the right over here you can see there's

basic shapes this is a drop down that does have a lot more i'm going to be just looking at these first few in this tutorial here today but i'm going to just pull a box i'm going to pull and drag it onto the work plane like this just so we have an object and what i want to do is actually show you how to get back to your main screen if i click on tinkercad up here and i'm just going to click on this and it's going to bring me back to my main screen and you'll see i have demo one and i have this object on here if i so it automatically saves it i can log on in different places different computers i don't have to be on the same computer i'm gonna go back and hit tinker this and it's gonna take me back uh to my last point where i was working on it so it saves

automatically for you so now i just want to show you some basic movement of the shape and how to change your view with this at any time i can click on this object and i can move it around the work plane just like this so i'm not changing the shape of it any i'm just moving it around on the work plane if i want to start to see it from a different angle look at this right here in this box so it says top and front if i go ahead and click on top i'm looking at the top view now we have these arrows where i can go around and look at the different views so i'm looking at it from underneath now what i tend to do though is i grab this box and i click and hold with my mouse and i move it around and i can quickly get to where i want to you can see how i can just really manipulate the view at any time if you hit this home button back here it just brings it right back to the original view so if you get it all twisted and everything you just want to bring it back just do that we have a few different ones so if i want to zoom up just to see everything fit that's what i would do there these are the zoom in and zoom out i use on my mouse the wheel to go back and forth but if you click on these you can see how you can zoom out and zoom in and this is just a perspective switch here you can see how it changes the perspective when i click on this one now the other thing i want to show you is with this are these right up here so if i have this selected if i click

off uh of these they're not available all of them but if i click on the object i have them available this can delete your object i can also do that on my keyboard by hitting delete or backspace but if i hit delete here's my undo so i can undo and i'll i also have a redo here too so you can see the shortcuts uh also control z and control y on those i can click on this again i also have a duplicate so if i need something if i made something and i need it to be exactly the same i could hit duplicate and i could move it just like this and i have a duplicate now i can also copy paste so if i highlight both so that notice i draw my selection tool around multiple i am now both of these are selected i could go to this one and hit copy and paste and now i have four of these just like that that's just some basic shapes to get rid of it i'm gonna get rid of a few of these now and just go back to my one and select now you probably noticed over

here on the right that we have a solid color now when i print if i was printing in 3d this is nothing to do what i would be printing because that's what the filament i put into the 3d this is just for the design aspect of it so i could quickly change the color just like this and you can see all the different colors that you can uh choose from transparency you can just click on any of these when you go through uh if i wanted it transparent just click like this so i'm going to go back to this just leave it at this shape and i'm going to quickly show you can change the shape through here just by moving the slider back and forth and you can see how it adjusts uh here the length if i pull this you'll see i get longer and the width get wider and the height so i better zoom out so you can see how high i made this you can see how how big it is now i'm going to move this back a little bit so you can put it in perspective and i'll change the angle so you can see everything now there's a quicker way to do this than this i like to kind of grab the handles on it i'm going to show you what all the handles do now with these black handle we have the black handles and the white handles if i grab let's say this one right here i'm going to zoom up if i grab this one right here i can move this what this direction in this direction i can't move it left or right it only allows me to go in two directions if i grab this one i can go left or right i cannot bring it up down i can just bring it change it like this now same if i look at the different angles here you can see all the different ones notice we have the white handles allows me to kind of do anything if i grab this handle here i can just change it around very quickly here and i can even change i'll just change the height here and now it looks like i have a piece of cheese we also have this little cone shape right here this

triangle this is how i lift things up and down so right now it's right on the work plane so if i click on this one right here you'll see as i drag up this number increases so if i want to put something right on the work plane that needs to be zero if i put zero right in here it goes back automatically so you can type numbers in there to in order to get to exactly what you want to do and the other handles i just want to point out with are these ones if you want to change the angle so look at here notice when i hover over it i'm getting different degrees i can change it to i can click and hold on this and i can change the angle i'll go back to it sometimes it can be a little finicky grabbing it there and i change the angle it shows me the degrees there or i could type in the angles like this i'm going to rotate it around you can see that there's other angles there too again at any time and sometimes it is easier to type in especially if you're building something connecting it to maybe some math curriculum if you're using angles to create something you can do that but you can click and hold these ones to rotate just like that you can see now i have it sticking through the bottom of the plane i can lift it up more if i wanted to just like this so that's some basic manipulation of using the handles or using these to change the size the shape and you can do this with any of these so if i bring this over here you can see if i wanted you can see how quickly you can make adjustments to the shapes i'm not going to go through all the shapes here but i do

want to point out a couple of different ones we have a scribble tool so if i drag if i just drag it over here what we can do with the scribble tool i could write my name or something and i'll just put a quick happy face here just like this and i'm going to click done down here and now zoom out and i have this uh 3d drawing that i just did and i noticed the handles are still there i can still manipulate it all the same way by using all the handles just like that we also have a text tool so if you look down

right here we have text i'm going to click on this and i'm going to bring some text and we don't want it to say text and i'm going to move this and if i click on the text right here i could make it say whoops i'll better click in the right spot and i'm just going to say hello and you can change the height and bevel everything in here just like the other ones we can change the font again we can manipulate it with all the same things notice the handles are there i can be lifting this up down rotating it like so those are just a couple of the basic shapes i want you to point out i notice that there are text and numbers here so if i click on text numbers you can do individual uh letters that you can bring uh onto here just like this too if you're uh spelling something out so now what i want to show you is i'm going to delete these i want to show you how you can group

objects together because this is the key part about designing is taking shapes and cutting pieces out of them in it and it's just a three-step process so i'm just going to go back to my basic shapes here and i'm just going to take the cube here and i'm going to go back change it to my home just like this and now i'm going to take this sphere like this and i'm going to just and what i'm going to show you here is if i bring this inside like this so i can merge these shapes together like this i can actually even if i select both of them notice so i draw my selection tool over both this is a group tool right here so i click group what that means notice they went to the same color because now they're together they're connected so if i start to change it it manipulates them both together i'm just going to undo a couple steps here back to where i was so it changed back to color so i know they're not group you can see i can take them apart but let's say i want to cut this out of here so if uh this shape and into the cube or into the box i'm going to select this i'm going to turn this into a hole just like this so you can see how it went into a hole now the next step would be just selecting both i'm going to select both of these like this and then the last step is to hit group so as soon as i hit group notice it took the chunk out of here i'm going to zoom in i took that out of there so i went i did the hole and then i grouped it and then i selected them both and grouped them and i took the chunk out of whatever was the hole took the chunk out of the other one so you can really start to manipulate shapes by using that feature of the hole

so let's give you a little building exercise here i just have this one object here you can see i'm going to use this as a wall and i'm going to build a quick house with a few different things i'm going to cut a hole as a door in it so first of all i need three more walls i could do a floor but i'm not gonna go in this example and the quick way i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna duplicate this so i'm gonna keep duplicating so i get four just like that and i have four now i'm gonna take one of these and i want to rotate it now i could grab but i know i if i rotate 90 degrees it will be just like this so i'm going to change my perspective again and i'm going to line up these walls right to here and you always need to be changing around because what you see in one angle might not be the right so you can see right there that doesn't match quite up with that so i'm going to drag this down right to there so i'm going to zoom back out and i'm going to take this one and i want to rotate it to 90 degrees like this hit enter and i'm going to take this wall and it should be the right size right here so now i have and if i zoom up i can test to see everything's looking okay i could change around and i'll leave it like this will be fine for the example that we have here so i've made this little box maybe i want a roof on it i'm going to change the angle to this again i'm going to go to 90 this way just to show you a different way you could drag it i like just typing in the number i'm going to lift this up drag this over again i have to keep changing my perspective because i won't know you can see that's what i mean you have to be looking where you want to put it so if i drag the size larger like this do i want some overhang we'll give it a little overhang like so and now you can see it's way off still i need to use this one and bring it down now i could bring it in i can bring it over but you have to keep changing your perspective to know what's happening so make sure you're telling the kids that as they go through so i would i'm going to just try to do it a little bit better than this but i'm not going to worry for this example too much i'm going to just make this a little bit larger just like that okay so then i wanted a door in here so this is where i have to make a hole now i could use i'm going to make a cube here and this just a little shorter here and i need a little skinnier and we'll say that's about a door size i'm going to push this right through the wall and i'm actually going to make this a different color so you can see and i have this actually sticking through the wall to make sure that it's going all the way through if i wanted a door on the other side i could so now if i just take this and go whole i need to select this and then i hit group you can see now i have a door just like that now i can grab in here and go ahead and group it so now i don't have to worry about pulling one uh piece out of the other and i can size things too so i could just grab it i could stretch it out this way i could make it taller and you can easily manipulate it together so that's just a little thing if you want to try kind of putting things together that way again let your imagination add windows add more things make it castle but i just wanted to show you an example of the different ways you could be building

building so just a couple more things i want to show you before i show you how to set up the class inside tinkercad i would need a uh just an object here and it is the snap grid and the ruler so if i look at the snap grid right now it's at one uh millimeter what that means i'm going to zoom up if i move notice how it just snaps one millimeter at a time if i move this if i want it to be five millimeters then it snaps at the half centimeter each of these blocks is a centimeter and it just snaps so depending on where you want to be placing if moving you know it defaults to one but you can see now it just moves over one at a time the other thing i want to show you there is a ruler that i can bring over here if i wanted to measure things this can help measuring because if you're giving students projects to recreate something that's authentic that may be solving a problem they have to design something and they need actual measurements this can help them do this i'm going to bring in another object here i'm going to close this ruler because i don't need it and just a few different things there's a few different views you can look at this is kind of a minecraft view you can't work in these ones you can just view so after you create something you can take a look at it and there's also a lego view just like that and then you can go back uh to where we were editing our shapes

now you can collaborate with other people so if we hit the plus here we can generate a link and then copy this link and send it through email and then they could open it up also and let's say you're going to 3d print what do you do if you go and create something what you would need to do is export this

like this and then you would export it as an stl say open it in a different in a slicer program and i can go into a different video about that and then you would open uh that up and it would slice through it and then would get ready for the 3d printing but i'll i just want to make sure you knew where that was so that gives you kind of a brief overview of how to use tinkercad here and i've kind of just touched the surface of it but i just want to show you lastly how to kind of set up of a class if you're a teacher looking to add your students if you are a teacher i do recommend

setting it up as a class it just makes it easier to view all the students projects i'm just back here at the start screen i'm going to go up top to classes and i've already created a class just an example class called grade 4 in here to create new classes just go ahead and hit create new you can click in here and you'll see i added one student called trevor in here i could add more students just by clicking in here and typing the names so how do they join so what we have here we have a class code and i'm going to show you a couple different ways that you can do this and they make it easy to explain you can see you have a class link so if you're using something like google classroom or microsoft teams you could put the code or put this url over and they could click on it and all they would know have to know is their nickname that gets generated when you add them to the class or if you have a class code which is this class code you can copy paste it somewhere enter it in and then enter the nickname but you can see the urls there i'm just going to go back i just wanted to point out here it says tinker class classrooms have been updated if you look you can join class they kind of walk you through this right here how it works for the students without accounts so join the class nickname and done that's kind of what i just showed you but some students might have an account and you want to join have them join your class you can get them to sign in then join class uh with the class code for the students so if they already have created one through google they could still join your classroom but just take a look at how they add and remember uh just to go to classes and you'll kind of see that information where you can easily add your students and there's other things like your lesson plans and everything there that you can kind of look through for more examples so i do recommend trying uh tinkercad out like i said i've used this for a great two to twelve uh kids love this they get engaged right away um on this program and it sets up even if you're looking at going into some 3d printing and there's still more things to work on than what i've showed you here today thanks for watching this week on teachers tech i'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials