3D Printed Periodic Puzzle

My youngest daughter loves all things science and she really wants to be a scientist when she grows up.  I really try to encourage her excitement about science and a little while back I tried to explain the periodic table to her however she did have a hard time understanding what I was trying to explain (she is only 9).  After thinking about this a little while I decided that I would make a game out of it by creating a periodic table puzzle.

I tried several different designs for the individual pieces but ended up settling on a piece that is 36mm X 46mm.  This gave me enough room to put both the element’s atomic number and symbol on the piece.

While I was creating the pieces I also group the pieces by the elements classification which allowed me to print them in different colors.  You can see the full project, and download the STL files from Thingiverse.

Creating the individual pieces was quite tedious but relatively easy.  I started off by creating a box 30mm X 40mm and 4mm in height as shown in the following image.

To make the interlocking part of my pieces, I took a 6-sided polygon and used a hallow box to cut it in half as shown in the next image.

I then selected both the polygon and the hallow box and grouped them together using the grouping tool. By grouping the two parts together, it made it easier to work with.  The grouping tool icon is in in the upper right portion of the screen and looks like this:

For the interlocking pieces to work, I needed to make the hallow portion slightly bigger than the solid portion.  The following images shows the sizes of each part.

Next I added the interlocking sides to the pieces to the original box.

I finally added the atomic number and symbol for each piece.  Since the original box was 4mm high, I made the numbers and letters 6mm so I would not have to worry about raising them to a certain height.

When you want to line up items like letters and numbers, you can create a hallow box and use it as a ruler.  The following image shows how I can line up the atomic number of 79 using a hallow box.

As you can see it was relatively simple to create each piece.