2. Week 02

This week we talked about group work and culture in the makerspace / fab lab, and also the internet of things.

Reflection

1. What are some opportunities in your context to work within your local community? Who you could collaborate with? How? What should happen to succeed in the collaboration?

We have connections to K8 schools, where students can share lessons and toys they create. We also are right near the Hudson River, with a school that cares a lot about sustainability, so it should be fairly easy to connect to people working with the environment in rivers. I haven’t made mahy of these connections because it takes time, and this is my first year teaching these things at this school, so I haven’t yet had the spare time to make those connections. My local Fab Lab teacher also works at my school, and has fantastic contacts I would relaly like to connect further with. In order for me to count it as a successful collaboration, my students should feel empowered, but the groups we’re collaborating with should also feel like my students’ work was actually actively helpful to them.

1. What are the next steps in development further a makerspace in your school? How do you envision the maker space?

The main thing I would like for our makerspace involves equipment. I would like to work on the following things before the stat of next year: * The electronics really really needs to be organized in a useful way and in someone’s head that is not just mine. I’d like to be clearer about where things are so that students (and I) can reach for a given part and know it’s there. * I do still want some boxes I can grab and move to another classroom with that contains several full electronics 101 boxes. I would like those boxes to have all of the same material in them, that I could count on when I grab a box for moving to a different classroom. * I would like there to be more electronics that are just easily available, for students to be able to imagine projects and have the materials already there, rather than waiting to go through the ordering process, which both takes time and requires them to know what they want rather than playing with what already exists.

I would also really like there to be more spaces to show off electronic and 3D work the students work on - art classes can more easily hang 2D objects on the wall, I want interactive exhibits for our students. I think we can maybe talk about this before next year, but I do not expect movement on it until the following year.

I think our Fab Lab does a fantastic job of being available to students and faculty at almost all times (even when someone is using the front of the room for a class), though there are sometimes unrelated-to-making classes using the space, which makes that harder, and the reason students can use the lab after school is my colleagues and I are often willing to stay later than our contract expects to facilitate. I would love for all teachers in the school to be more familiar with what we have on offer, so they can more easily decide when it makes sense to integrate their classes with things we have in the fab lab, and help students with those projects.

We have been talking about a student lab assistant, which I think will help bring more of the school community into the classroom. We’ve also talked about a website where you could look up the process of using each of our devices, which the lab assistant would help us use. I think we are getting that lab assistant by the end of this year.

1. What is the potential of physical computing and IoT for your teaching? Do you have any ideas on how you are planning to integrate those techniques in your context?

I continue to be able to basically cheat at these questions by “Physical Computing” being actively part of my job description - so I have students learn how they can get Circuit Playgrounds and Microbits talking to each other with infrared or radio. I connected this to how remotes work. I also had the students connect Circuit Playgrounds to each other with a serial connection, which I explained by also showing them how USB worked (See the project description below). They have connected the Microbits to the computer using Serial as well - this is important for reading exact values of sensors.

Project Description

Towards the beginning of the year, I had students learn how to send secret messages to each other via infrared messages. You can read the blog post I wrote about that class. You may also be interested in the worksheet I wrote for it that the students filled in, Infrared messages worked great for the class that was only about them, but when I had the students send infrared messages between creatures for a final project I did at the end of that term, the students (and I) quickly learned that the Circuit Playground did not have enough memory to easily deal with infrared while also dealing with anything that resembled complicated code.

This meant that I also taught them how to connect Circuit Playgrounds to each other using Serial Connection, which I described at this blog post. I got the idea for doing this from when one student who works on a lot of electronics on his own realized he could use Serial instead of IR communication for his creature. My fab lab coordinator and I collaborated with him to help make the code for this work. His pumpkin is pictured below.

Gallery

If you pressed the A button on one of the pumpkin eyes, both servos would move down to make angry eyebrows due to an elaborate serial wiring in the back.

Sample code

Infrared on the Circuit Playground

Serial on the Circuit Playground

The student project above was more complicated than this, but this was all I required my students to do