Hi, it is Jacob here and in these short videos I’m going to guide you through the Tinkercad app for iPad. This is one of my favourite apps to use in the classroom for 3D modelling and CAD work. So Tinkercad is a completely free app and you can make an account on the website and then when you launch your account you’ll get a screen that looks like this.

From here I’m going to tap on to create and I want to create a new 3D design today. We can do some code blocks and some circuits as well, but that’s a topic for another video. We’ll make a 3D design and get started.

Okay, now that’s opened. We can see a large empty space which is called the work plane. The work plane is like a page in Pages or Numbers except it’s a 3D space that we can manipulate and rotate. I’ll show you that in a second. To begin with though, we can choose what size we want the work plane to be. Larger, smaller, whatever you like. So I’ll tap on to settings in the bottom right hand corner. And here we can specify the exact size we want in millimetres. I’m going to keep mine 120 for now. And then I can close the settings screen.

Okay, now we’ve got our work plane sorted. Let’s add our first three-dimensional shape. And we can do that by simply dragging and dropping from the shape library on the right hand side. I’ve got this nice red cube here. And I’ll pop it on the work plane like this.

Now, at this point, I can use one finger anywhere on the screen to rotate that 3D space to look at it from different angles. As well as using my finger to rotate the page, I can also use the options on the left hand side. The top one of which I call the view cube. Now, the view cube is a three-dimensional cube that you can rotate. And as you do so, your work plane will move as well.

Underneath that view cube we’ve also got some different buttons. The first one is a little house, and that will return you to the home view. That’s the view we have when we first open this file at any point. So if you’ve zoomed in or zoomed out or gone somewhere a bit weird, tapping the home button will bring you straight back to your whole work plane. Underneath there is a button that will zoom into the model you’ve built or the object you’ve currently selected. So rather than seeing the whole work plane, if I tap on here it will zoom into that cube for me. And of course, we’ve got zoom in and zoom out below as well.

The view cube has got one other hidden power as well and that is if you tap on to any of the faces of the cube, it’s going to orientate your view to match that face. If you tap on top, for example, you’ll get a top-down view of your model. And so that’s your basic controls to move around and navigate in 3D space.

Now, we’re going to have a look at changing the shape itself and moving that cube into something a little bit more interesting. When you tap on the shape to select it, you’re going to see little toggles in the corners which you can drag and drop to resize. Grabbing the corner will scale the whole shape. And grabbing an edge will scale just that particular axis. We can also tap on the numbers that appear and type in specific values if you want to. And as we move our 3D space around, you’ll notice there’s a white dot on the top of my shape as well. This will help me change the height of my shape. So using these little squares, we can control every different aspect of that shape and the size it is on the page.

Let’s have a look now at adding a second shape. I’ll put a cylinder onto my page. Now I’m going to grab that cylinder and drag and drop it and just put it on the work plane alongside my cuboid. You can see now that’s sat on the work plane on the same level as my cuboid. But I might want to put an object on top of another shape. And I can do that by simply dragging and dropping another cylinder and this time releasing it on top of the cuboid. This is a really quick way of stacking shapes.

And then if I move my finger and rotate that work plane, you’re going to see in 3D that one is on top of the shape and one is alongside it. However, I want both of them on top of that cuboid. So I’m going to drag the cylinder that’s not currently on there. And I’m going to move it sideways. However, you can see it’s actually going inside of the cuboid. It’s not going on top. So we need to adjust the height of this shape. And we can do that by using the little black arrow on the top. I kind of call it the arrowhead with my students. And if I tap and drag the arrowhead, I can lift it up in the air or move it down underneath the work plane if I need to.

And so, just like that, we’ve learned how to add shapes onto our work plane and to manipulate, resize, and move them in a 3D space. Let’s add one last shape to the top of this. I’ll put a cone on the top. And when I tap onto that shape, I can actually custom­ise how it looks. We haven’t got to keep it the colour it currently is. So, at the top here, we get the little inspector window. And if I expand that, I can choose a colour as simply as this. Let’s go for blue. And depending on the shape that you’ve selected, you may get some additional options underneath, such as changing the radius, changing the height, the amount of sides on a hexagon, for example. All these options will be there, bespoke to the shape you’ve currently selected.

Now, the very last thing to show you in this first getting started video is how we can rotate objects in 3D space. So for this, I’m going to add one last shape onto my page. And yep, I think that half cylinder will do a good job. Now, with that shape selected, as well as the dots in the corners, you may notice there are some little rotational arrows as well. As you move the work plane, you’re going to see there are actually three different arrows. One for the X, Y, and Z axis. I can then tap onto here and I can rotate just like you’d expect except it doesn’t quite work like you might expect. If I move my finger inside the digital protractor, it’s going to jump in increments to jump to 90°, 180°, and so on. If I swipe my finger out of the circle and then move in the same motion around that outside circle, it will move completely freely. Using the three different axes here, I can rotate my shape in exactly the way that I want.

And so that’s the end of our first tutorial on Tinkercad. So jump in the app now, have a little play with some shapes, and when you’re ready, I’ll join you in the next video and we’ll go a little bit deeper into Tinkercad. I’ll see you soon.