Hello everyone!

I would like to help a school to make solid digraphs (combinations of 2 letters) so they can improve their tools for writing learning. The digraphs in French are “an”, “ai”, “on”, “ch”, “gn”, etc.

Handcrafting of all these digraphs would be very time consuming and inelegant. Even if the result is not strictly identical to their existing letters (style, color, thickness), I was wondering if 3D printing could be a simple way to make nice digraphs. So I would like to 3D print a test digraph like “ch”.

The school is the Montessori school that my 3-years-old daughter attends. Its management and teachers want to extend their “alphabet mobile” (movable alphabet), i.e. a set of solid letters that the kids use to compose words and sentences. The tool has been originally designed by Maria Montessori, with the Italian language in mind, so without the difficult French phonemes like the “nasales”. This French specificity is actually one reason for explaining the delay of “explosion into writing” in the French Montessori schools compared to the world average. Following a recent study, the French Montessori Association now recommends the schools to enrich the alphabets with digraphs. As the kids start by writing the sounds (orthography comes later) it is important that they pick only one element for each sound.

I would be very grateful for any feedback concerning the feasibility, the design of this project, and of course, I am looking forward to understanding 3D printing better! I hope we can help the school, and ultimately the kids in their learning process!

Thanks a lot for your feedbacks!

Here is a sample of individual letters:

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The small ones are 34mm high and the big ones are 67mm high, both are very thin: 1 mm ! so just a few layers of 3D printing! I wonder if the result would resist manipulation.

So far, I am using CATIA 3DExperience R2014x, and I have tried two approaches: I create a text in the sketcher, using either the closest font I have found (“little days”), I edit the splines to avoid self intersection so I can then create a pad, or in the second approach, I use a picture of existing letter as a support for spline sketching. In both cases,  I then use the “3D Printing Preparation” app to create a tessellation and export an STL file.   

Font-based design:

the issue here is that I miss the “Italic” and “bold” on this font, this would help to match the style and to improve the robustness, but I am not expert enough to transform the sketch or/and the 3D to simulate “italic” and “bold”.

Spline-based design:

The result is much better and closer to existing letters style, but it takes much more time to create.

There are probably better techniques...  Solidworks 2014? 3D scan?  Experts ideas welcome :-)