Last week our students began the first of many projects in Makerbots and Mashups, a freshman seminar course at the University of Mary Washington on “making things” using 3D printers, electronics, robotics, and more. We wanted to students to begin the process of exploring how to conceptualize gears and moving parts without worrying about being perfect or using electronics. This project is called Cardboard Automata.
Students, working alone or in small groups, came up with a concept for what they wanted to accomplish. Once they decided on their concept they began cutting and assembling a variety of materials including cardboard, styrofoam, tape, rubber bands, and glue. The resulting machines may seem basic but the cognitive work it takes to conceive how these parts move together is fairly advanced for the first 2 weeks of the course. And what’s great about this project is that as students learn to use more advanced tools like the 3D printers and robotics they can add on to these machines, fine tune, and automate them in ways they couldn’t have dreamed possible!
Here are a few photos of students assembling their projects. Over the next few days we’ll see them blogging about their projects in more detail so keep an eye out for that as well.
Can’t wait to see what comes out of this process. When groups start posting their retrospectives, I hope they include some shots of the “whoops” moments as well as the completed objects.
Did every group start with the same batch of ingredients, or just open access to the same parts library?
Everyone had access to all the materials and got to choose what parts they would create with them. We’ve absolutely told them that their grade is based on their narrative of the process rather than a fully functioning perfect final product and that’s what we’re interested in hearing in these posts.
Wicked project. Totally going to steal it. I want to incorporate the functionality of gear creation in Inkscape as well. Students could design the gears in inkscape, print them out to scale on paper and then overlay them onto cardboard to be traced and cut out. I actually think the physical creation with cardboard goes a long way to help students learn by doing with low risk, low cost but BIG learning. Fingers crossed for a laser cutter for you Tim!