By Phil Cotton, learnbylayers founder.

I am a teacher myself and with many schools closing globally and the prospect of my own school closing, we are in unprecedented times. Teachers around the world are being asked to prepare for home learning. This provides huge challenges in education as nothing can replace a physical classroom and having a teacher teaching students.

With the current situation that I find myself in, along with other educators around the world, I want to help as many teachers as possible in these testing times and will be making the beginner’s curriculum free for open access for the next 8 weeks. No login, no sign up, just visit the website and children we will be able to work through the curriculum if their school is closed.

I recommend that teachers use TinkerCAD classrooms and issue your classes with a Class code and Nickname. Then they can complete the TinkerCAD modeling tutorials and you will be able to give feedback to your classes. The ability for the teacher to feedback to learners is a vital part of teaching and learning, so whatever mechanism you will be using e.g. Google classrooms or Microsoft teams, by using TinkerCAD classrooms you will quickly be able to assess how your students are doing and give advice on how to improve.

All the worksheets are downloadable and printable so students will be able to print off worksheets. Also, they will have access to the answer sheets allowing them to self assess their answers. I know a very small minority of students do have their own 3D printers so they will be able to print their own models. However, in probably 99% of cases, this won’t be possible so I would recommend that classes work through the curriculum and their models are printed on return to school. With TinkerCAD classrooms their models will be saved to the cloud so upon return to school you can easily download and print them from one place.

Instructions to give to students.

Visit www.learnbylayers.com, click on the free lessons tab and then the beginner’s curriculum will be accessible with no login.

While this is usually a paid subscription, like many other businesses in society we will be financially affected by Covid 19. We have included a Paypal donate button for any donations, no matter how small is greatly appreciated.

I hope that we can all get through this challenging time.

Phil Cotton