Introduction

My kid is in elementary school and this year they have multiplication with factors from 1 to 10. 

When I was a kid I had a 10x10 table with numbers from 1 to 100 and tiles with factors 1x1 to 10x10. The idea is to put the tiles in a bag, pull a tile from the bag, e.g., 4x8, calculate the product and place it in the right square in the table, e.g., 32.

The other game is to have factors in the table and have products on tiles. So you could draw a 42 and you would place it on 6x7 or 7x6.

The version I had was made from cardboard. But, since I have a 3D printer, I decided to print it. 

Files

I've enclosed all the necessary files for printing both versions of the game. For example, the pictured table would be made using product_table.stl and product_table_text.stl and the tiles using factors_tiles.stl and factors_tiles_text.stl. The other table (with factors) and tiles (with products) are being printed and the pictures will be put up when available. There's also the “no hint” version of the product table without the first row and column (see Versions for an explanation)

The 3MF files contians pairs of STLs already combined and ready to print with all the necessary commands for Prusa.

Finally there's the OpenSCAD source with which you can change fonts, size,… The current design was made such that the spacing between tiles is large enough to allow easy removal of single tiles (in case of errors) and the recesses in the table deep enough for the tiles to stay in place.

Printing

The table and tiles were printed with Prusament PLA vanilla white and galaxy black on a Prusa Mk3S with a 0.4mm nozzle and default settings in slicer.

You will notice that the print has two colors. The printer is a stock Prusa Mk3S without the multi-material attachment. Instead I changed the colors by hand. The procedure is described in https://forum.prusa3d.com/forum/prusaslicer/manual-multicolor/

Versions:

• v1.0: (6. March 2023)
  • Initial upload
• v1.1: (8. March 2023)
  • Added underlines for tiles that contain digits 6, 8 and 9, making them easier to read
  • My kid has now learned a shortcut. Instead of multiplying, e.g., 6x7, and finding the correct spot in the table, he just looks where row 6 and column 7 intersect (the devious ….). So I've added (and will shortly be printing) a version of the product table without the first row and column, named product_table-no_hint*