Maker Centered Learning Blog

My toy hacking experience was a little daunting, humbling and ultimately exciting! Faith and I screamed out loud when we got our toys connected. We decided to have the sound from her toy play on my toy and we solicited help from students. Although I have participated in a toy hacking workshop before, I primarily hacked the appearance of the toy rather than the electronics. I decided to document my progress with this imovie: https://youtu.be/YhIdl-MZ2Ko . When I brought my toys into school the noises coming out of my bag immediately attracted a student who was there early. She came into my room and replaced any dead batteries for me. Later in the day Faith and I sat down and deconstructed our toys. We rewatched videos and looked up what the coloring of wires mean, and then we went and grabbed a 5th grader we knew we could depend on to help us. We figured out (somewhat) what we were looking at and came up with our goal. We were able to isolate the speakers and the wires that complete...

I decided to revisit an engineering project I do with first grade around properties of water. We start out with lot of tasks related to sink/float - as you can see from this design a boat that will hold weight challenge One of our  tasks is to design a roof surface that will repel the most water. For the sake of time, I gave them a template of a house to cut out and put together - not so creative and not so maker oriented! Why don't they design the whole house?! For this assignment I decided to try it. I started with a triangular pyramid, then decided that a rectangular pyramid was more what I had in mind. Great math skills - visualizing, measuring, angles, shapes, nets, precision. At first I used a box knife to cut, but I found scissors simpler to use and ending in a cleaner looking cut.  I used to make forts and castles with large cardboard boxes with my own children. This required much more precision than that, and I would definitely plan ahead to make the task app...

https://www.tinkercad.com/things/ejLDoPRAHtl-swanky-allis-tumelo/editv2?sharecode=ARR-ugXjVT1-ROQrWPXR4MA7Nvj_1gjD_x8KPiWNnd8= While I've watched others using Tinkercard, this was my first direct experience. Since I said on my voicethread that I would like to design and print quilt templates I decided to see if I could design a simple block. I pasted cubes to the work space and went about sizing them all to the same width and length. Then I found that if I just used cut and paste they were all the same size. Next I wanted a consistent height. After dragging a couple individually (which was a little finicky)  I just typed in the height I wanted. This is a very simple application of what I was thinking but it gave me some good practice. I do think that the workspace and tools could be very neat if you were making a  more abstract design with curves and irregular shapes that would be harder to just cut out with a quilting ruler. I don't plan on printing this out. Faith and I ha...