Today was a busy day for iNEST club members, with some students volunteering to demonstrate their circuitry skills with copper foil tape for peers during a lunch table event designed to recruit new members into the club. Thanks to Mariam for organizing another lunch table activity and giving club members a chance to hone their leadership skills--a goal of the club. Later in the afternoon, students met for our weekly iNEST club meeting. The club meeting began with the usual snack, and Deborah cued up a video showing how one school was using Hummingbird robotics to inspire club members to dive into this technology. Three of the club members who will be helping out with the student showcase at NC-TIES on Friday morning met briefly in the library to make some soft circuit pins for display during the showcase, and to go over LittleBits basics to demonstrate for attendees. Other club members continued working on various projects, including Hummingbird, 3d pens, 3d printing, and digital embroidery as depicted below. Today's Amazon outage impacted the club, as students were unable to log-into TinkerCad to work on 3d designs, but they were able to identify many other project opportunities in the 3D GameLab learning environment.
This week in the iNEST Maker Club, students leading our table at the NC-TIES student showcase next week continued prepping circuitry projects to demonstrate at the conference. All of the conductible ink projects started last week dried and successfully lit-up with LEDs this week, and students created some new copper foil circuit cards as shown below (lighthouse, rocket). Dr. Oliver and Stephanie pulled out some of the LittleBits for the students to demo at the conference and started building out a tote of materials to take to the conference. Next week students will prep the final project for demonstration--soft circuits. In addition to the student showcase, club mentors had a regular session presentation accepted for the conference, and Dr. Oliver has finished the slides for that presentation that can be viewed below. Other students in the club this week worked on a variety of projects from 3d pens to digital embroidery to paper fabrication/origami. Behind the scenes, Stephanie has been working on new quests to populate into our 3D GameLab learning environment that will get students coding and working with Sphero robotics. Dr. Oliver and Stephanie attended a Sphero workshop at NC State Libraries last week to get an introduction to this new product bought for the club. This week in the iNEST maker club, the students who will be helping out with our accepted "student showcase" presentation at the NC-TIES state technology conference in early March, met with Dr. Oliver to start developing some sample circuit projects for display. This week the girls worked on some conductible ink projects, and next week they will work on some conductible copper foil projects. By the time the conference rolls around, we should have plenty of examples to share with conference attendees. Other club members continued working on a variety of projects this week. A few students worked on sewing projects for Valentine's Day, and Dr. Oliver brought over some new red/white/pink fabric samples and a new digital sewing machine for club use. Other students continued working with TinkerCad, and 9-10 new .STL files were submitted to our shared drive for 3D-printing. The 3D pens continue to be a hot item, and we started a sign-up sheet for students to take turns playing with the 3D pens and manually fabricating intricate objects. Dr. Oliver and Stephanie will be attending a Sphero workshop at the NC State library on Thursday evening, in preparation for the rollout of this new programmed robotics platform in March. The club owns several Spheros now, and club mentors will be learning about and loading related curricular activities into the club's 3D GameLab learning environment soon.
This week in the iNEST maker club... mentors kicked off the meeting by discussing new 3d prints that were fabricated since the last meeting. Most prints were successful, but the few that failed were discussed with mentors pointing out common flaws in 3d designs and how to work around them. We rolled out the four Lix 3d pens that were purchased for the club today, and four students quickly got to work creating 3d objects by hand. Several students have signed up to take their turn with the pens next week. Many students continued working with TinkerCad today, two designs were printed during the club meeting, and eleven new designs were dropped in the common drive for printing. Other project areas we observed students working on today included sewing, digital embroidery, and programming Scratch games. Mary Clay, Deborah, and Dr. Oliver spent some time discussing the upcoming NC-TIES conference, and met briefly with the five students who will be attending the conference and putting on a student showcase presentation. These students will spend the next three weeks creating sample circuitry projects to share at the showcase. We're excited they will have this leadership opportunity to share their knowledge of makerspace circuitry projects (copper foil, conductible ink, conductible thread, and LittleBits).
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Purpose:Dr. Oliver's weekly update of activities in the iNEST Maker Club. Archives
April 2019
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