For the 3d printing assignment, I made something inspired by this type of toy:

The difference, however, is that it’s printed in all black so you can’t see the location of the marble/bearing and mine has 3 different levels between which you must navigate. The first step was mapping the levels:

From this you can see that, in order to successfully complete the maze you have to go from level one to two, from there back down to level one, up to three, down to two, and then back up to three and out the other hole. Here’s my rendering of the maze cube:

Note that the location of walls in the top level is noted on the outside of the cube, I did the same for the first level and also mapped the holes (though not the levels to which they corresponded). Here’s the cube with various bits stripped away:

And finally, the finished product:

There are little dips in the hole markers on top to hold the bearings. I found that a bead from a necklace works better than the spheres that I tried to print. At this point, I’ve had about 7 people try it out and everyone has just resorted to shaking it violently until the ball falls out.

The cube itself is slightly lower fidelity than I was expecting, there are some imperfections on the outside and the holes sag a bit. Also, at one point a fair bit of shaking a ball inside caused a small curly piece of plastic to break off of something and eventually fall out with more shaking.

The takeaway is that it does technically work and it’s very difficult to win without brute force. Also, 3D printing is cool.