Virtual dreamhouse – Tinkercad & ROBLOX

This week I hosted a career day at the lab with my sons class visiting. He´s in 2. grade and has done a bit of modelling in Tinkercad before. The rest of the class were total beginners. Prior to the visit they had drawn pictures of their dream house to get some ideas beforehand. I gave a short 10 min introduction to Tinkercad and showed some of the more complex stuff I have modelled in Fusion360. The point being, that with practice you can reach a point were you become able to model whatever you imagine and make it into a physical object.

 

Enough said, they started drawing right away, and we talked about helping each other with what we discover along the way. The room is filled with one kid asking “How do I lift the box”? “I know that, let me show you” said another. They were eager to help each other and they all ended up with something that resembled a house. They drew for about 70 minutes and didn´t want their usual break, which is always a good sign. Many of the houses ended up being not-suitable-for-printing, but that didn´t matter much because the plan was to build a little virtual town, they could visit and walk around in. Combined with Discord, maybe even play hide and seek.

I didn´t have any experience in Roblox studio, but it was pretty straight forward. The Tinkercad file was exported as .OBJ and added to a terrain. A few houses had to be reduced in Meshmixer because they exceeded 10000 triangles. In some of the house you are able to go inside and other houses pushes you back – this I haven´t figured out yet, but it must have something to with how they have drawn it. The Roblox game was published and a link sent to the parents for them to visit the game at home

ROBLOX Studio

Afterwards a couple of parents have contacted me because their kids wanted to continue working on their house – wonderful! I used the new feature in Tinkercad which enables you to create a class and make user accounts. This worked really well.

I will definitely try this another time. We had around 2 hours total time at hand, but I think there is a lot of potential turning it into a project instead.

Ressources: Tinkercad.com, Roblox studio, Discord, Meshmixer

Visit the game yourself – requires you make a roblox account (it´s free) LINK TO GAME