Summary

This is the fish design which was created to go with the Chinese language course in our local primary school. This page will include the model/design as well as the steps I took to construct it.

How I Designed This

This was designed in Tinkercad, which I'm sure most of you already know and/or if you have read the main project's page, you will be acquainted with it's advantages and usage scenarios.

Every design has to start with an initial idea. Mindlessly placing blocks down, waiting for something to come to you or hoping it'll turn into something great doesn't always work.
That's why research can be a key step in creating something. I generally just browse Thingiverse or Tinkercad galleries and draw in my inspiration from there.

For a class of young kids, letting them draw their ideas or plans will help them visualize it for later, this is if they will be designing it themselves. If they are going to just play around in Tinkercad and/or customize a premade model, making them draw their idea may be counter-intuitive.
Older kids such as year 5 through to high school will probably not benefit from drawing their plans but a different method of getting them to create plans will still be helpful. This could include a class discussion or talking to the children individually. Talking amongst themselves, ideally while they have access to Tinkercad is great too.

As with all models, they have to start with some basic building blocks. For this case (and in most others), it became a sphere. I then stretched it to resemble a cartoony fish.
I then went ahead and put in the tail. It was just a paraboloid, rotated 90° and stretched/shrunk. It intersects with the body in the center just about where I thought it looked good.

Note that throughout the design process, I've been keeping in mind that I would eventually 3d print it. That influenced a few of my choices regarding overhang angles.

This was the design of the dorsal fin. I had envisioned something like a dolphin's fin, and as I went through all the different shapes i could use to cut out back end, I finally decided on a slightly squished hemisphere, moving it around until it looked alright and then grouping them together. It didn't leave me with the perfect fin, but was good enough.

As seen above, I moved and re-sized the dorsal fin into it's position.
Then I created a pectoral fin. Yet again, it is another paraboloid. And again, as always it was just a task of resizing and reshaping.
However for this part of the design, since I had moved it into some absurd angles, I decided to use the mirror tool instead of manually copying and rotating it. The tool can be found under the adjust tab in the top bar. When an object is selected, it allows you reverse it over the x, y or z axis. Very helpful.

The eyes, two spheres placed at the front of the head. That's about it really.

I was looking at it after I'd done the eyes, and suddenly thought it needed a mouth. A goldfish mouth to be precise. Why? Remember when I said I was thinking about being able to print this. I couldn't make a pacman style mouth because the overhangs wouldn't work well, so a spherical hole makes much more sense.

But on a side note. Aren't goldfish so cute close up.

So you may have noticed that I've been placing some of the shapes partly under the work plane. This ties back into the printability of the model. It needs a flat surface both for adhesion and tidiness. That's why I used a square block to cut away everything underneath the work plane.

So there you have it. The finished design of a simple fish easily created in Tinkercad. This is one of the simpler designs but sure looks decent enough, even when it's printed.

Fish - MakerEd