Today in the iNEST Maker Club, members continued working with TinkerCad to design their own 3D models for printing on the club's new LulzBot 3D printers. A lot of different models were seen today, from jewelry to animals to personalized keychains and cell phone cases (see pics below). We've already enjoyed our first teachable moments, as students attempted to 3D-print flawed designs with curved bases. The 3D printer likes models with a flat base! We're still figuring out our policies for getting 3D .STL model files from students' laptops to the 3D printer-connected laptops, using either USB drives or emailing the files to one of the club mentors to load. We're also still figuring out our policies for cueing up the 3D prints, since each student model takes from 30-60 minutes to print, or longer. That means only two or three students can print per club meeting. However, Dr. Oliver and Mrs. Vick are going to run some 3D prints during the week, and return them to students the following club meeting.
At the beginning of today's meeting, Dr. Oliver introduced two new quests now available in the club's 3D GameLab learning environment, both related to Scratch coding cards. Students can now follow instructions on these cards to code ten different computer programs with the simple Scratch programming language, including four games (race, hide-and-seek, pong, and catch). The first students to try out the cards today indicated the instructions were easy to follow. Some club members have already been using the similar coding program Snap in their work with Hummingbird robotics. Comments are closed.
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Purpose:Dr. Oliver's weekly update of activities in the iNEST Maker Club. Archives
April 2019
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