1_ The Possibilities of Digital Fabrication in K-12 Education

The maker mindset, its impact in education and learning theories supporting these practices.

For this first week educators are asked to fill the "About me" section of our websites with relevant information, both about ourselves and about our teaching environments.
To see the information pubkished on that section please visit the following link

For the second week... (WIP)

For the third week.we were asked to design and cut an object that can be used in our classrooms.

I chose to recreate a sign I saw some time ago at Raspberry Pi Foundation´s makerspace - it was there in one of the walls, and although it didn't hold a predominant spot on the place it said everything about how to work on a project: have fun, try to be as meticulous as possible when working on your designs but embrace mistakes and even celebrate them. I think (and hope) this sign will bring a smile to your face, and hopefully to the faces of my students!

Making this sign wasn't particularly difficult because I had already worked with vector graphics before. The hardest part of the process was taking the exported .svg into Corel Draw (because that's what they used at my local FabLab) and finding that the design had changed. I ended up editing font type and size and rearranging the elements directly in Corel Draw before sending everything to the laser ccutter. There the process was divided into 2 steps: first engraving the letters and inner outline, and only after that was done proceed with actual cutting of the sign. All in all it was a simple but nice and fun project.


Reflection questions

This year we are integrating a laser cutter to the equipment of our makerspace, so thinking about activities involving this technology is not optional anymore! We've already been talking about asking our students to model certain things and objects but taking care of scale and dimensions, not only of the pieces themselves but also of the objects that will interact with those pieces. For example, if they are designing an enclosure for electronic modules (motors, LCD screens, LEDs) then they will have to make sure to measure those thing carefully, so once the enclosure is done, everything fits as intended. Having them work with dimensions will be one of our intended learning outcomes for these kind of activities.

When designing my learning activities I always try to find things that I think will be relevant to my students. I try to take into account their experiences and preferences, but also try to find what they might find challenging but valuable enough to make it worth the effort. and for me everything is about the process. Many times my students ask me (specially during the first weeks of classes) what will happe if they work on something that ends up not working as expected. I always tell them that I don't expect it to work at first try - but if they can explain why something is not working and plan a course of action to fix what is wrong, that tells me they are at the next level.

For this module's Field Activity we were asked to design a lesson plan for a subject that we teach. The idea is that the lesson plan must include a physical teaching aid (object, model, or manipulative) that we design and fabricate for use in the classroom.

For this actvity I will work around a lesson for learning the basics of robor control systems using a small mobile robot with IR sensors for line following. The idea is that the students learn how a robot can follow a line using its sensors and some basic programming.

Usually, a line follower is placed on a prebuild track that has a black line on it. This track can be built by drawing or printing the line on a large sheet of paper, or by sticking black tape on the floor. My idea was to make some kind of modular track with laser cut squares with line engraved on them and some way of joining them together. That way one can reconfigure the track easily by rearranging its pieces, with the added benefit of making it easier to store the track when not using it.

I designed two different pieces for the track: one with a straight line and the other with a curved 90° turn on it. I also made a simple mechanism to interlock the pieces of the track.

I cut 2 pieces to test the idea, and turns out the engraved track wasn't dark enough to trigger the sensors. On the pictures posted below you can see that when put agains the original printed on paper track, the robot's sensors detect the black line, but when using the laser cut track, the sensors detect nothing. To fix it I decided to paint the lines by hand using a black marker, and amazingly that simple fix worked. As you can see on the pictures below, once painted the track is easily detected by the robot's sensors.


You can see the test track working with the robot in the following video:


With the tests completed, I can now cut many copies of each model of pieces (straight line and curved line) and have my students and assemble tracks of different shapes to test my student's programs running on the robot. And no matter how long the track, at the end of every class storing the pieces is very easy because each part is only 400 x 400 mm.

You can find the lesson plan that uses this modular track using this link.