chess sets

Last semester, students in my Design for Digital Fabrication course designed and created a chess set for their final assignment. They were required to use Rhino to model the set, create final renderings complete with textures and environment, and the were required to use Makerware to slice and then print the full chess set on the Makerbot Replicators (I might add that we only have three MB printers in the DCRL so I brought mine in so we could have four printers). The final push was a bit hectic with all of the people needing to print with that few of printers, but most planned accordingly and handled the stress with no trouble. Fred and Calvin even made a nice box for their respective sets. All in all this was a great assignment and I believe the students gained a lot from the experience. The Makerbots took a beating, so I'll probably scale this back in future courses to just the king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, and pawn. We may also utilize Shapeways as it would be nice to have these in different materials. Making the leap to lost ABS/PLA casting might be a future step in advanced courses. Too many options...