Development of 3D-Design Education in the Subject “Informatics” for Japanese High Schools

In recent years, 3D printers have attracted considerable attention in education. In Japan, some schools use 3D printers in classrooms, and some teachers develop teaching materials and tools for classrooms use. Although research and applications of 3D printers have increased at universities and technical colleges (as the target age increases), few implementations exist in primary and secondary education. Examples in primary and secondary education remain limited, and lessons that teach 3D design as a preliminary step for 3D printing remain scarce. In contrast, high-school informatics textbooks include a “Communication and Information Design” section that presents pictograms and gives an example lesson on creating new pictograms using 2D design software. This paper proposes a lesson on 3D pictogram design within the compulsory subject “Informatics I, Communication and Information Design” and develops a student manual for 3D pictogram design. The manual was developed based on interviews with high-school teachers who currently teach informatics. The proposed lesson was taught to 143 first-year students at a Tokyo metropolitan high school for a total of four hours, and researchers surveyed student attitudes before and after instruction. The attitude survey was conducted in a 5-item, 5-field, 5-subject format. The post-survey included a free-form response section. The responses of the 122 students who completed both pre- and post-surveys were incorporated into the analysis and evaluation, and a paired t -test was used to compare and analyze the changes in attitude toward learning 2D design versus 3D design to evaluate effectiveness.