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Introduction
Quests
Tower of Hanoi
NYS Standards

Introduction



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tinkercad.com

Tinkercad is a web-based 3D modeler that has only three basic tools: Add, Subtract and Workplane. It requires WebGL support, so you'll have to use at least Chrome 10 or Firefox 4.

While Tinkercad is simple to use and allows you to build models quickly and share them with Thingiverse and Twitter, what you cannot do is move or rotate your model or forms once they are created. Tinkercad is also in beta and is continually changing. The last update was at the end of July. While new shapes were added, some keyboard shortcuts were eliminated.





To get Tinkercad to run on Mac with Firefox you'll have to do the following:
  1. Type about:config in the Firefox 4 URL bar
  2. Type webgl in the search box
  3. webgl.force-enabled = true
  4. Go to https://tinkercad.com and refresh the page
Background: Driver support on older OS/Graphics card combinations is bad so the browser vendors have blacklisted a number of devices. All of Mac OS X 10.5 is blacklisted in Firefox, what you did above is circumvent this blacklisting.



There are a number of keyboard and mouse shortcuts in Tinkercad that allow you to work smarter and faster.
Keyboard shortcuts:
  • a switch to add mode
  • s switch to sub mode
  • w switch to workplane mode
  • m switch to measure mode
  • esc cancel current drawing operation and remove the reference point
  • shift after starting a drawing operation you can press shift to make the operation axis aligned.
Mouse shortcuts:
Right click is the same as CTRL+click.

  • right click/CTRL+click make selected face new reference face for the workplane
  • left drag draw a line with the current tool shape
  • shift-left drag change tool extrusion depth
  • right drag/CTRL+drag rotate the camera
  • shift-right drag/CTRL-shift drag pan the camera
  • mouse wheel zoom in and out