This is a simple little exercise I came up with for showing students how to convert 2D to 3D and vise versa. The idea is to not go straight to 3D, but in stead give them a hands-on task that gets the idea into their heads. It’s not a completely new thing for most students, but the relation to UV unwrapping is. And of course it is fun to try to make it challenging as well.

The example

To give my students some idea of what I expected them to do I showed them an example I made the night before class. It’s a basic svg I made in Inkscape that I printed on A4 paper.

I could have just made a single T shape to make a single cube, but since I was teaching university level students that was a bit too simple. In stead I made this, which turns into 2 cubes that are connected at a corner. The real world result that I glued together the night before class, and showed my students in the morning is below here.

The task

After showing the students my example, I provided them all with paper, rulers, pencils, glue or tape, and scissors. Then put them right to work. The task I gave them was was rather simple…

Make something more complicated than a single cube!

The results

As usual my students surprised me with their inventiveness. The range of designs they came up with was really nice. Especially the surprises and “misinterpretations” that I really didn’t see coming. All I did during the class was walk around and give some pointers.

Round up

That’s basicly all this class was. After finishing the exercise we got stuck in in Blender 3D to UV unwrap the models they had made the day before. It was a lot easier for me to teach them that technique after they had done exactly the opposite with paper (which is what this exercise is). All in all this was a fun hour to break up the week of staring at computer screens, and I’ll definitely repeat it in future.

I hope this helps you, and if you have similar fun ways of teaching your students, please let me know. I’m always looking for novel ways of getting these complex ideas into students heads.

Dolf