As its name suggests, 123D Make helps you "make" your design in the physical world by converting it to a form where the resulting material can be folded, stacked, or interlocked to reveal the design. I got a great email yesterday regarding 123D Make. I thought I would share it with It's Alive in the Lab readers.

Dear Scott,

I hope this email finds you well. I'm Mostafa Gabr, an Architect and a Lecturer in Arab Academy, and many other universities in Egypt, I am sending you my experience with my students in using the 123D Make program. First I would like to thank Autodesk for this program. It is a great addition to the long list of Autodesk programs and a new step towards the age of digital fabrication to reveal the design.

Enlarge.

The students' challenge was to model and fabricate the Khalifa tower of United Arab Emirates, the tallest tower on Earth according to The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Three groups were created to fabricate the tower with three different fabrication approaches: Folding, Staking, and Interlocking. The model tower was 1.65 m (5.43 ft) — almost as tall as some students (scale 1:500 of the real 828 m (2,717 ft).

All three teams overcame some challenges:

• The Folding and the Interlocking groups faced the problem that the slices/faces were longer than the laser cutter bed, so they used AutoCAD to fix the output file and make the slices/faces shorter.

• The Stacking group only faced the problem of the amount of material which made the model heavy to hold.

• The Folding group's last challenge was to assemble all of the parts all together and close the model shape! That was hard — hence no assembly instructions available for the folding.

In the end the Folding group took the longest time in assembling (5 hours). After them was the Stacking group (3 hours). The winner was the Interlocking group (0.5 hours).

I would like to thank you for posting our experience with 123D Make program. Thanks for your help and support.

Warm greetings from the hot and always glorious Cairo :),
Mostafa Gabr
Msc. in Architecture and Environmental Design
Department of Construction & Architectural Engineering
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO 
New Cairo, Egypt, 11835, SSE - 1099

Congratulations to all of the students who participated in the challenge.

Towering educational programs are alive in the lab.