Improving Boys' Reading with 3D Printing | CREATE Education Project

To celebrate World Book Day CREATE Education would like to share this inspiring story from Bolton School Park Rd Junior Boys’ School.

Upon receiving a 3D printer for the Junior School, Design Technology Teacher, Aaron Winstanley was keen to look at how it could be used across the school to benefit all areas of the curriculum. Previously the school had tried many schemes to encourage the boys to read more for pleasure with varied results.

The reading reward scheme is intended to act as an incentive to encourage the boys to read different types of material, to appreciate different genres and authors and to discover the variety of ways of presenting the written words. Aaron decided to introduce a new reward scheme incentive that utilised the 3D printer to create a visible reward that the boys could strive to achieve.

After some consideration, it was determined that the school would design some special reward clips that would slide onto the boy’s blazers. In order to engage the students with this initiative, the students were directly involved in designing the blazer clips themselves.

The students used the Tayasui Sketches School App on their iPads to design the graphics and they loved being involved, especially the Yr3 and Yr4 boys. Finally, a design was created and modelled for 3D printing. At this stage, the boys experienced the 3D printing process and saw the design come to life.

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The badges were 3D printed in a series of different filament colours and as the boys read more, they can progress through the colour bands. This is rather like earning new coloured belts in martial arts disciplines, so to promote the scheme and encourage the progression, the scheme was marketed as the “Blazer Book Belt” reward scheme.

The scheme has engaged the entire school and is so popular that the school is now struggling to print enough blazer book belts to keep up with the demand for them. The boys are proud to display their achievements on their blazers and always keen to progress to the next level.