Workshop
Apr 22, 2026
3D Printing
Pukalani Elementary 3D Printing STEM Group
Notes from helping with Pukalani Elementary's after-school 3D printing group and watching a room full of kids take design, printing, and problem-solving more seriously than most adults would expect.
The room did not sound like a standard elementary school classroom.
It sounded like a workshop.
There was the sharp clack of mechanical keyboards, which is not a sound I expected to associate with a room full of elementary school kids, plus the steady background hum of printers and cooling fans. It was not quiet, but it was focused. Every few minutes, somebody would hit a small victory. A shape finally behaved in Tinkercad. A print started cleanly. A first layer stuck. You could hear those moments in the room.
I spent a few hours each week this spring helping with the 3D printing after school group at Pukalani Elementary. I work in tech, and most of what I build stays on screens, so I went in assuming I would mostly be helping kids through the hard parts. That assumption did not last very long.
To be clear, I am not affiliated with Pukalani Elementary in any official way beyond being an extremely proud parent. I am also not affiliated with STEMworks. I just had the chance to see what they are making possible for these kids, and it was difficult to walk away without thinking they are doing something unusually valuable.
This got serious quickly
The most striking part of the program was not simply that the kids were having fun, although they clearly were. It was how quickly they got genuinely invested in what they were making.
That showed up almost immediately. Their first assignment was straightforward. They were making name tags in Tinkercad. I had no strong expectations for what that would look like once a room full of third through fifth graders got hold of it. Within the first couple of classes, every one of them had made one. As they finished, the printers were already running in the background, and kids kept wandering over to watch the plastic build up on the plate. The shift from screen to object was immediate. Nobody needed that moment explained to them.
From there the room developed its own momentum. Kids were testing ideas, noticing constraints, and adjusting accordingly. One of the more humbling parts for me was how naturally that seemed to come to them. I have spent my whole life around technology and still found myself learning things from these kids in Tinkercad almost every session.
What stood out even more was how quickly they started teaching each other. As soon as one student figured something out, they wanted to show somebody else. That was probably my favorite part of the whole program. Skills spread fast in a room where everyone is excited to compare notes, help out, and quietly establish that they have, in fact, solved the problem first.
The adult in the room
Joe Abraham was exactly as my son had described him before I ever stepped into the room. In fairness, my son had the read on him first. Joe is excellent with the kids. He is patient, encouraging, and unusually steady in a room that could very easily drift the other direction. He made a group of elementary school students feel comfortable asking questions, trying things, getting stuck, and asking for help without making any of that feel like failure. They trusted him, which is not a small thing, and he was consistently there for them when they did.
He also put real thought into the environment itself. Over the course of the program he had brought in new 3D printers from multiple sources, plus a steady supply of filament to keep the whole thing moving. It was good hardware, not random leftovers dragged into a classroom and asked to perform miracles. The printer lineup felt carefully chosen for the job. That kind of effort is easy to miss if you only see the room once it is already running, but it does not happen by accident.
That part matters because the whole thing clearly worked. The kids were engaged from the start. They wanted to build things, solve problems, and see whether the idea on the screen could survive contact with an actual printer. Whatever I expected going in, it was not this level of focus from most of the kids. Keeping a room at that age both energized and under control is not automatic. Joe made it look much easier than it probably was.
When the plastic started showing up
Once the prints started running, the project changed. It was no longer just design software. It was manufacturing, with all the helpful realism that implies.
That was where the program became especially interesting to me. The kids were starting to notice what would print cleanly, what would need support, what might fail, and why. Once the printer entered the picture, the decisions on the screen had consequences.
A small sample of what accumulated over the run of the group. Once the printers got going, the room started filling up with evidence.
My son, for example, built a miniature gaming setup with a desk, chair, computer tower, monitor, speaker, headphones, keyboard, mouse, and a USB stick, because those apparently remain perfectly engineered for disappearance at any scale. He also made custom vehicles, a spaceship, and his name tag.
A couple of the smaller vehicle builds. The kind of project that looks simple until you realize somebody had to decide how every part of it would actually print.
What mattered more than the list of things he made was how consistently he stopped what he was doing to help anyone nearby who got stuck. Every time. No exception. He still got his own work done, but he seemed to treat helping the person next to him as part of the assignment, whether anyone had formally assigned it or not. That was the part I was proudest of.
The other part that caught my attention was hearing him explain why he was designing certain pieces the way he was so they would print better. He was already thinking about orientation on the build plate, where a part would be strongest, and how much extra support material it would need to print cleanly. If you are not deep in 3D printing, that probably sounds like a needlessly specific thing for a kid to be considering. It is. That is exactly why it stood out. He was weighing tradeoffs that a lot of adults do not even realize exist until a print fails in a slightly insulting way.
If you know anything about Fused Deposition Modeling, usually shortened to FDM printing, you know that support strategy is usually learned the expensive way. Watching him think about overhangs and printability during the design stage was a little surreal.
Another thing the kids got excited about was printing articulated dragons, lizards, and other moving pieces that come off the printer already assembled. That is the kind of thing FDM printing is unusually good at and traditional injection molding is generally not. You can print a whole flexible or articulated object in one shot, already moving, without needing to mold separate parts and assemble them afterward. Watching those prints build layer by layer made the possibilities feel a lot bigger. It was easy to see how a room full of kids could start connecting that to real world problem solving once they realized the machine could make shapes and mechanisms that would be difficult to produce other ways.
The printers had their opinions
Joe and I spent much of our time handling the hardware side, which meant dealing with the usual FDM tax. Failed prints, jams, filament breaks, adhesion problems, and the rest of the genre all showed up. The printers were excellent classroom tools right up until they started spitting out tangled piles of plastic and reminding everyone that 3D printing is still 3D printing.
The kids were not just noticing when something failed. They were starting to tell us what they thought had happened and why. Third through fifth graders were spotting print issues and offering troubleshooting theories about problems plenty of adults do not know exist. The larger lesson was that the hardware problems were becoming part of the education instead of interruptions to it.
That may have been one of the strongest signals in the room. The kids did not treat printer failures as random bad luck. They were starting to read them as information.
A few parts I still think about
A few moments from the program stuck with me because they made the broader point better than any abstract summary could.
One student spent hours refining an airplane design, adjusting parts to fit together, reworking pieces for the build plate, and thinking through the plan instead of just throwing shapes together and hoping one of them would accidentally become an airplane. Another student wanted to recreate a bike part and needed it to be precise, so she spent a long stretch learning to use calipers and rebuilding the piece in Tinkercad from measurements. The print was still running when we left on the last day, so I cannot claim a final result, but I would not bet against her getting there.
The airplane project that kept getting refined until it actually worked as a finished object instead of just an idea on a screen.
Those are not cute classroom moments. Watching a fifth grader pick up calipers to reverse engineer a part is the kind of thing that makes you recalibrate what you think kids can do when the tools are put in front of them and somebody competent takes them seriously.
What I took from it
What stayed with me was not any single print, or even any single student. It was how much fun everyone was having while still learning real things. Some kids clearly loved designing, some liked printing or assembling, and some liked painting, but it all felt connected. They were making things, improving them, and helping each other in the process.
I went in expecting to help with a 3D printing group for a few hours each week. I left thinking less about the machines than about what the kids were already capable of doing with them, which is probably the right outcome.