Tag Archives: challenge

Watch YouMagine for the Ultimaker Gumball Challenge pieces from Maker Faire Bay Area 2016!

Dragon Climber Toy

Keep your eyes peeled for a slew of new chibi designs popping up on YouMagine over the weekend.

The Ultimaker team invited four schools to participate in the Ultimaker Gumball Challenge.

  • River Bend Middle School, Virginia
  • Saint Ann’s School, New York
  • Comstock High School, Michigan
  • Advanced Learning Center, Utah

Each school was sent 1000 gumball capsules and some 3D-printing filament. Students designed and printed the models and decorated their machines.

All of the money collected in these machines will be donated to support STEM initiatives at the schools, and whichever school sells the most prints will also win an Ultimaker 2+ 3D printer!

Toy Catapult for Maker Faire

You Can Play Along From Home!

This Gumball Challenge joins a bold lineage of fun projects making use of dime store toy dispensers in combination with 3D printing, in particular starting with The Incredible 3D Printing Gumball Gallery art project from DesignMakeTeach who helped to shape this challenge and drew one of his local classrooms into the mix.

We hope that readers and Maker Faire Bay Area attendees both will go home inspired to try challenges like this with their own classrooms and communities!

Here’s the core challenge: “What original 3D printed designs could you create to fit inside a tiny two inch (five centimeter) gumball capsule?”

Want to encourage creativity and teach those new to 3D printing about design constraints? By placing a constraint on size, you encourage creativity and to problem solving. Challenge participants to design whatever they want, or choose a theme.

3 piece puzzle toy

More Gumball Capsules to Come!

Continue to check back for the designs labeled “gumball” on YouMagine in the coming weeks to see all of the student designs, and read more at: www.ultimaker.com/gumball

Designs by comstockps on YouMagine

Visit these designs on YouMagine.com!



Shared On YouMagine – Cube Puzzle Quartet by mathgrrl

Cube Puzzle Quartet by mathgrrl YouMagine ?

mathgrrl will be sharing a series of classic cube puzzles with the Ultimaker team at Maker Faire Bay Area in the San Francisco area this weekend — and check out her description on YouMagine for a few points of inspiration for why you might want to tackle this sort of design challenge yourself or with a class of students. (We shared a few of them below.)

Cube Puzzle Quartet by mathgrrl:

Have students use their favorite 3D design software to create their own Cube Puzzles. This project can be adapted for many different educational subject areas and at a variety of levels:

Beginner: Use Tinkercad or Morphi to place boxes together to construct puzzle pieces that fit together into a 3x3x3 cube. How do you know they will all fit together into the cube? Print out your puzzle and have fellow students try it out to rate its difficulty.

Intermediate: Use Blender, Fusion 360, or AutoCAD to create puzzle pieces, and use fillets and offsets so that the pieces are pleasant to hold and fit together nicely. Create a container box that will hold the assembled Cube Puzzle. Who can make the most difficult puzzle? …

Advanced: Use the software BurrTools to construct a Cube Puzzle, analyze it for constructability, and test how many solutions it has. Can you find a new 3x3x3 Cube puzzles that has only one solution? You can also try your hand at more advanced puzzles like interlocking Burr Puzzles or puzzles with unit shapes other than cubes….

Read more.

Cube Puzzle Quartet by mathgrrl 2 YouMagine

Develop a New 3D Printing Technology Challenge

At YouMagine we’re always trying to stimulate new exciting 3D printing developments, objects & inventions. We want to make all the stuff in the world better, shareable and malleable. We’ve decided to give away one Ultimaker Original kit to the person who wins the “Develop a New 3D Printing Technology Challenge.” The idea is for someone to come up with an idea for a new 3D printing technology. They will describe to us how they hope to make this a reality. We will pick the best idea coupled that seems achievable on February 1st. This person or group will then win an Ultimaker that they can use to implement their technology. They will then share their invention with the world through YouMagine.

Ultimaker Original Kit

Ultimaker Original Kit

How do you win?

  • Go to the design ideas section and:
  • Come up with an idea for a new or improved 3D printing technology.
  • So not an incremental improvement to an existing 3D printer or new part.
  • You may want to 3D print glass, electronics, etc.
  • A similar 3D printing process could exist but you could want to perfect or change it.
  • Describe succinctly why you are the person capable of doing this.
  • Tell us how you will do this.
  • You will also describe to us how you plan to make this a reality and within what time frame you hope to achieve this.
  • Groups, classes and organizations may submit ideas and win also
  • The winner will be chosen on the 1st of February by the YouMagine team.

Rules for the winner:

  • The winner could use the Ultimaker Original kit to implement the technology.
  • The winner will document their development process.
  • The winner will share their success or failure with us so we can all learn.
  • The winner will share their invention with the world through an open source license of their choice via YouMagine.
  • The winner will have a deadline to show their progress to the YouMagine community by June 1st.