3D designing & printing Xingming Yin (personal name seals)

Karen Blumberg
Duration: 3 classes
I worked with Yue Tang and Yusi Gao, Class VIII Mandarin teachers at The Brearley School, on a Xingming Yin (personal name seals) project. Historically and currently, a yin is a seal or stamp used to “prove identity on documents, contracts, art, or similar items where authorship is considered important.”

Materials
- Sharpies
- Tinkercad or Morphi
- Inkpad
- Paper
Yue and Yusi allotted three class periods for students to design a seal in Tinkercad, print their stamp, and try using the finished product. The steps involved are:

- Create a hand-drawn design.
- Use Photoshop to isolate the ink.
- Flip the image horizontally.
- Export as JPG.
- Convert JPG to SVG (with online converter.
- Import SVG to Tinkercad.
- Place SVG onto a box.
- Slice and 3D print

To view slides shared with the Brearley girls to help them navigate the Photoshop and Tinkercad steps at their own pace and the slides from a presentation about this project presented at a NYCISTk6 meetup with other technology teachers from NYC independent schools go to Karen's blog.
