3D Printing Prototypes

Our after school Maker Club is always looking for work. I regularly solicit the faculty and staff at our school for problems that our students could solve. I like to ask other teachers, “What can we make for you?”

We recently began work on a project for our After-School Program. They require stands for a number of tabletop signs that display the names of the various after school offerings. These signs help instructors gather students in the central cafe before they disperse to classrooms. The current models are starting to break down, so it seemed like a good time to reach out to the Maker Club.

The video compilation shows some of the steps that students went through to design a model in TinkerCAD and then 3D print it for testing.

Pressure Plate Sensor Prototypes

5th graders have hand-coded their Stopwatch programs in Scratch, and now it’s time to build pressure-plate sensors that can activate their timers during a Track-and-Field race. Students are prototyping with MakeyMakey‘s, cardboard, wire, tinfoil, tape, and MakeDo connectors. Some early testing successes and failures are leading to new questions. Go engineers, go!

Model Elevator w/LEGO Robotics

Three 4th Graders describe a model elevator that they made with LEGO NXT, cardboard, and toy parts. Built as part of an Engineering and Robotics study done with one of our many amazing Science teachers, Mrs. Uribe. I was really impressed with the outcome.

Code a Stopwatch in Scratch

My 5th graders are in the middle of an Engineering challenge where they are seeking to build sensors on the running track to detect and record racers’ sprint times automatically. Here one student describes the stopwatch program that we have been building in a coding environment called Scratch. (the code is blurry at first, but comes clearly into focus soon 🙂  )

Find the sample code at: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/20170662/