How to Host a Tinkercad Contest or Challenge

A contest is a wonderful way to inspire learning and growth in a student. People tend to work the hardest when there is something on the line to gain. A Tinkercad contest is no exception to this rule, and will help a student’s creativity blossom as he/she attempts to achieve a goal by trying his/her best to achieve an incentive, learning techniques and skills along the way. This guide will go through how to structure and host a Tinkercad contest yourself!

A few of the things a contest needs are a compelling theme, a due date, a concrete way to submit and keep track of entries, and a motivating prize.

For teachers, this is an easy step. Simply create an activity in a class and have students submit it from there. For anyone else, I would suggest creating a Tinkercad design, adding the details mentioned in later steps to the description, and publishing it.

Think of a theme that students will want to join. A good rule of thumb is to pick a broad topic to base the contest off, not a niche one. An example of this is to host a contest on creating cars rather than a Ford vehicle only contest, per se. Also, a good idea is to pick one that students will feel is easy enough to learn and grow and not one that “throws them to the wolves” of creating a super complicated design. This way, student will feel ready to attempt the challenge as well as not be too overwhelmed by it.

Set the rules you find most necessary straight. For example, many contests hosted on Tinkercad don't allow the use of parts imported from other sites. Rules like this can be added to the general info of the contest, and this will let the entrants know what kind of entries are allowed and which ones will be denied.

Next, you'd want to choose a due date that best suits when you want entries submitted by. Setting a due date pushes students to work under a timer, so less procrastination exists and more learning ensues.

A tried and true way to receive entries would be to have a tag people can add to their designs. This allows you to simply search up the tag and see all the entries into the contest. Make sure that the tag is not something generic, as you want to be able to find only the entries to your contest. Also make sure the tag does not contain any spaces, as the Tinkercad search function uses spaces as a way to separate the search into different parts. Examples of bad tags would be like "Car Contest" or "car", while a good tag would look like "MyCarContest2022". Another good habit is to check to see if the tag you have in mind has been used before. If so, simply change the tag to something else.

Any good contest has a prize that will motivate entrants to try hard to achieve it. For example, a new trend that has spiked among users of Tinkercad is to create a trophy display case to showcase all the trophies they've acquired from contests they've won, such as this example. Creating a set of trophies for your contest (gold, silver, and bronze) is a great way to motivate people to try and achieve the highest place in your contest.

Once the contest has run up to the due date, it's time to start gathering the winners circle! Judge the entries based on your own criteria (which can be anything such as creativity, detail, effort, etc.) and list out either all the placements or just the top three and allow them to copy a design with the trophy they won if that was your preferred prize.

Enjoy hosting your own Tinkercad contest and seeing the creativity flow through your students as they try their best to achieve the final prize, in turn learning more about the software and their own tinkering skills in the process!