3-28-2019. On Thursday this week 32 members of the iNEST maker club traveled by charter coach to Charlotte to visit the Discovery Place museum. Spencer Williams planned an educational visit that included time in the museum's makerspace, a private robotics lab with LEGO EV3 devices and coding in the museum's thinkerspace, time to explore hands-on exhibits on the 1st/2nd floors of the museum, and lunch with other school groups visiting the museum on Thursday. The slide show below provides a glimpse of the learning and fun had by all. 3-26-2019. This week in the iNEST maker club the girls continued their work with Hummingbird robotics with several group projects showing some motion with motors and servos. In the next few weeks we should be able to transition the students who have been working with Hummingbird into the library to work with Cigdem on 3D printing activities. The girls who were working on 3D printing this week were tasked with designing an overhead house/floor plan in Tinkercad for their ideal home and printing out these home designs. The club will be taking its spring field trip this Thursday to Discovery Place in Charlotte, participating in some maker challenges in the museum's Thinkerspace. More comments and pictures to follow.
3/12/2019. The iNEST maker club continued with Hummingbird projects this week and 3d printing activities. Most of the girls were able to get some motion on their Hummingbird projects this week with servos and motors responding to sensors that detected light, sound, or distance. We continue to face some difficulties with the Hummingbird platform dropping its USB connection to the BirdBrain Robot Server software on the laptops whenever the circuit board is wired into electricity. The electrical plus USB connections in tandem appear to cause some conflict that causes the connection to drop, and this has led to some frustration as the girls must debug whether a lack of motion results from an error in their Scratch program or from a hardware malfunction with constant checking of the connection. We will contact Hummingbird to inquire, but suspect this is a hardware issue with a relatively new product that was not adequately tested before being sold to the public. Cigdem worked with some of the girls in the library this week on 3d printing activities, challenging them to sketch then design in 3d software Tinkercad the different steps of mitosis. The 3d printers are also causing the group some challenges the past few weeks with prints getting half-way done and then pulling off the print bed. Jennifer has tested placing some glue stick on the best before printing which works some of the time, but the beds may need replacing for a permanent fix. The realities of makerspace. Wake County is on spring break next week, so our next club update will come in two weeks on March 26th.
3/7/2019. The big day finally arrived! Spencer and Laura chaperoned a contingent of five iNEST club members to the NC-TIES state technology conference in Raleigh today where they shared their growing expertise of coding with the MicroBit platform. The girls shared three MicroBit projects at the conference: telegraph, rock-paper-scissors, and banana keyboard. Thanks to Jennifer for arranging the girls' code in the cloud for easy access over wireless at the conference, and congratulations to the girls who did a great job sharing their work and helping to inform state educators about this programming platform!
3/5/2019. This week in iNEST the girls continued working on their Hummingbird projects. We are starting to see some progress with the coding with most groups having some code that interfaces with the circuit board to activate sensors which triggers different effectors (servos, motors, vibration motors). Some sensors (sound) are proving more difficult than others (distance), so some groups are shifting plans with regard to sensors used. Thursday this week a contingent of students from the club will be attending the NC-TIES state technology conference to show off their MicroBit projects in a student showcase presentation accepted by the conference. Good luck with the presentation!
|
Purpose:Dr. Oliver's weekly update of activities in the iNEST Maker Club. Archives
April 2019
|