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Archive: Education

February 8, 2010

Exploring the business of making

For the next few months, in concert with our "Your Desktop Factory" themed issue of MAKE (Volume 21), we're going to be exploring the world of "maker business," turning your passion for making things into a means of making money. We'll look at everything from casual commerce, selling small numbers of goods online, at places like Etsy and the upcoming Makers Market, to the running of a more serious and sustainable small business. We'll be talking to, and have guest articles by, maker businessfolk across this spectrum, from those just starting out, to those who are making a comfortable living as self-employed makers. We'll also be touching on everything from the most philosophical questions of why to the more pragmatic nuts and bolts of how.

Do you run a small "maker business?" If so, we'd love to hear from you. If creating such a business is something you've thought about, what questions/concerns do you have? What would you like to see us cover in this series? Let us know in the comments, or email me (gareth at makezine). We'd love for this series to be a useful service to you, especially if going into such a business is a fantasy, but you have nagging questions or reservations that hold you back, or just need a little encouragement from those who've made this sort of career change work for them.

From MAKE magazine:
make volume 21 little cover.jpg
MAKE Volume 21 is the Desktop Manufacturing issue, with how-to articles on making three-dimensional parts using inexpensive computer-controlled manufacturing equipment. Both additive (RepRap, CandyFab) and subtractive (Lumenlab Micro CNC) systems are covered. Also in this issue: instructions for making a cigar box guitar, building your own CNC for under $800, running a mini electric bike with a cordless drill, making a magic photo cube, and tons more. If you're a subscriber, you may have your issue in hand already, and can access the Digital Edition. Otherwise, you can pick up MAKE 21 in the Maker Shed or look for it on newsstands near you!

Math Monday: Skewer hyperboloid

Skewer hyperboloid

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

Thirty two shish kabob skewers and 176 small rubber bands are all it takes to make a beautiful hyperbolid of revolution. This is an example of what is called a "ruled surface," meaning even though it is curved, it is made of straight lines.

Below is the same object seen from the top. Make one of your own following the instructions here, but be careful not to skewer yourself!

More:

February 7, 2010

Study structures with straws

The forces that affect buildings and other structures can be modeled inexpensively and quickly by using the humble drinking straw. Usually, the projects built with drinking straws are rapid build. Storage can be an issue if you plan on having students work the design over multiple classes, or saving the structure for reference. This really becomes a problem if you are doing the same project with a full load of 5 classes. By doing the project in a single class period, you can easily reuse the straws, having students discard any cut ones and replenish them with new for the next group.

For fasteners, there are a few options. Tape can work, but is hard to remove if you are reusing straws. This can be good if you are aiming for a more durable product. Sewing pins can be used over an over again. Having students count out the pins they need and keeping them in plastic cups is works for multiple classes. As a new batch of kids collects their supplies, they just check to see that the last group left the right number of pins in the cup. This can occur at the same time they get the straws they will need. Some towers are built with paper clips as the fastener. If you do this, you may give the option of using wire cutters and pliers to modify the pins.

In introducing the ideas of the project, you will want to discuss the forces of tension, compression, torsion and shear. As students build, they should be able to recognize the forces that affect buildings and other structures and devise ways to compensate for them.

Often in straw towers, you will want to incorporate the differences between live load and dead load. Sometimes called dynamic load and static load, you can model them by having the tower hold a weight, representing the live or dynamic load. You can also have students become more aware of factor of safety and failure analysis of their structure.

The building of these towers can lead to a competitive situation. You can have students all build with the same materials, and set the grades on how high the towers stand while holding the live load. One way of doing the calculation is to set the highest and lowest possible grade, 100 and 75 for example. Then you measure the towers, identifying the tallest structure. If the tallest tower is 50 inches, then each inch is worth 1/2 point. The group with the tallest load bearing tower gets the 100. A tower that holds the live load at 40 inches would get a 95. The group that has the ball on the floor gets the 75. The other groups in between get grades based on the height of the ball, or other load.

You can also use a project like this to examine the forces affecting a building during an earthquake.

Have you built a straw tower as a student, or have you used the project as a teacher? How well does a project like this work in homeschooling? What techniques work well, and what resources are really helpful?

February 6, 2010

LEGO smartphone gaming rigs

These are fun enclosures for your iPod or other smartphone. I made a simple one for my G1, and now need to find some driving/biking games to try it out on. It was fun and frustrating to stir the bin in search of just the right part. So often, when kids build with them, they make wildly complex designs that are at times of low structural integrity. Is there any formal LEGO design curriculum out there?

This is a great way to test out your rapid prototyping skills. Once you get a decent iteration, then the hunt is on for a more permanent solution.

February 1, 2010

Math Monday: Morton Bradley sculpture

Morton Bradley sculpture

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

It's amazing what can be made from paper. These two mathematical sculptures by Morton C. Bradley are 16" and 20" in diameter, respectively, made from 2-ply Strathmore paper. The geometric forms are each based on twelve copies of a Kepler-Poinsot polyhedron, with twelve great dodecahedra on the left and twelve small stellated dodecahedra on the right. If you want to try putting together your own paper models, all you really need to know is that, in each case, the visible facets are isosceles triangles in which the ratio of one edge length to the other is 1.618. In the form below-left, each triangle has two equal short edges and one longer edge; at right, they have two equal longer edges and one short edge.

The originals, now at the Indiana University Art Museum, took months to painstakingly create and paint in the 1970s, but modern additive fabrication techniques can make plastic replicas of the forms in hours (see below). These three-inch models were made from nylon by selective laser sintering. If you have access to a 3D printing machine, you can make your own copies of these and other Bradley designs by downloading the STL files available here. At The Museum of Mathematics, we like the way these illustrate both the beauty of math and the notion that complex structures can be understood in terms of simpler parts.

More:
Math Monday: Tetraxis puzzle
Math Monday: Giant burr puzzles
Math Monday: Fractal polyhedra clusters
Math Monday: Giant SOMA puzzle
Math Monday: Tie your bagel in a knot!
Math Monday: Playing card constructions
Introducing "Math Monday"

January 31, 2010

Using paper airplanes to learn about flight

Need a way to help the youth around you learn about flight? Try out paper airplanes! Most people know how to make a basic paper airplane, but there are other designs out there, some even claiming to be the ultimate paper airplane design. Inside the Dangerous Book for Boys is a two page section on paper airplanes with a few alternate designs you may have not tried.

Some of the concepts you'll want to feature are lift, drag, thrust and gravity. A project with such inexpensive materials as this is also a great way to help make students aware of the design process. By using working paper models, you can also help students grasp airfoil design and theory. By adjusting their designs and making additional iterations, students can see real examples of how and why planes fly.There are some great resources for understanding flight and designs for paper airplanes. Share with us the comments how you have used airplanes in the classroom as a student and teacher.

Another Make: Electronics lab journal

We've posted about Jim Kelly's online weblog, chronicling his way through our beginning book, Make: Electronics. But Jim's not the only person taking this trip online. Ian Fitzpatrick is doing the same thing. And he's doing video for most of the entries, giving you another way into the experiments. Nice. Many thanks, Ian.

Domo Domo, Ian Fitzpatrick's Project's Log: Learning Electronics

More:
Tom Igoe raves about Make: Electronics
They call it "trouble" shooting for a reason
Jim Kelly's Make: Electronics lab update
Make: Electronics: "Teaching at its best!"
A Make: Electronics lab journal
Make: Electronics - Interview with Charles Platt & Gareth Branwyn
Make: Electronics and the 555 man

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Electronics
Our Price: $34.99
Want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Start working on some excellent projects as soon as you crack open this unique, hands-on book. Build the circuits first, then learn the theory behind them! With Make: Electronics, you'll learn all of the basic components and important principles through a series of "learn by discovery" experiments. And you don't need to know a thing about electricity to get started.

Deluxe Make: Electronics Toolkit
Our Price: $124.99
Do you want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Not sure where to start, or what tools you might need? We've taken care of all the questions with our deluxe tool kit from the Maker Shed, featuring our best-selling book, Make: Electronics.

January 27, 2010

Open MAKE at the Exploratorium, this Saturday

Michelle Hlubinka, MAKE's Education Director, sent us this announcement about the upcoming Open MAKE at the SF Exploratorium:

As part of our ongoing quest to encourage more young people to exercise their innate curiosity and creativity by making things, this Saturday, January 30th, we're kicking off a four-month collaboration with the Exploratorium's Learning Studio, TechShop, and Disney-Pixar.

Our calendar of upcoming themes and makers at the Exploratorium:

January 30th: Bristlebots & Blinkybugs -- Ken Murphy and Windell Oskay & Lenore Edman
February 27th: Wearables & Soft Circuitry -- Adrian Freed
March 27th: Make Your Own Kind of Music -- Walter Kitundu and Krys Bobrowski
April 24th: Motors & Mechanisms -- Brad Prether and Ernie Fosselius

Each Saturday we meet follows a simple schedule:

11:00 Dale Dougherty interviews makers in the McBean Theatre
12:30 Featured makers and hands-on making on the museum floor
3:00 Events end

It's a first experiment in a new program we call Young Makers, in which we intend to create an infrastructure to nurture kids who want to learn by making, beyond what they can do with construction kits. We hope to fulfill a dire need: satisfying a little bit of what shop classes used to do before they, lamentably, started getting booted out of schools. The idea behind Young Makers is to create a community, both on-line and physical, that brings together like-minded kids, adult mentors, and fabrication facilities -- those who love to build and to learn by making. The role of the mentors is to help young people find a project vision if they don't already have one, and then to help them realize that vision. Along the way mentors will expose the underlying math, science, and engineering principles behind the projects, teach tool usage and safety, and collectively all participants -- youth and mentors alike -- will create a collaborative culture of innovation and experimentation. The Maker Faire becomes the deadline, and offers a stage for the resulting projects to be exhibited and explained. Monthly meetings will be used to build the kind of collaborative culture we feel is crucial to the program. Namely, a culture that embraces failure, encourages cross-disciplinary projects that meld math, science, technology, and art, and a culture that is both open-ended and open-minded.

We feel the Young Makers program distinguishes itself in several ways from other programs such as robotics competitions and science fairs. In particular, there are no winners and losers, and the projects are open-ended and child driven. Moreover, there are very few boundaries -- just like the Maker Faire, anything that is cool is fair game.

(Thanks to Tony DeRose of Pixar for the writeup about the program, from which I've borrowed liberally.)

January 26, 2010

Tom Igoe raves about Make: Electronics

The glowing reviews of Make: Electronics just keep on coming. We're thrilled by the response. And yes, we love that it's selling plenty of copies, but the thing we're most excited about is that people get it -- the goals we set forth, to create an attractive, engaging, fun, plain English beginner's guide, that made it okay to make mistakes, seem to have paid off. It seems to really be filling a need we suspected was significant. The book is currently ranked #669 on Amazon and remains at #1 in the Circuits, Robotics, and Robotics and Automation categories, as well as #3 in Electronics overall.

A few days ago, we (author Charles Platt and the book team) got a wonderful congratulatory note from physical computing and Arduino pioneer, Tom Igoe, author of Physical Computing and Making Things Talk (which he did with Make: Books). Today, Tom sent us a link to a review of the book he posted on his blog:

Charles Platt writes in a tone, and with a philosophy that I thoroughly agree with: learn by doing it. I love the fact that he not only gives exercises, but gives some that he knows are going to fail, and tells you so. He shows you what can go wrong, and makes you do it, so you've already experienced the failure and don't fear it. Exercises like licking a 9V battery, or measuring the resistance of your tongue seem scary at first, but are safer than they seem, and valuable learning exercises.

Platt doesn't hide his mistakes, either. He uses them as stories to illustrate his lessons. Reading - and seeing in pictures -- how he blew up a capacitor, for example, is fascinating, and lets you know that when you make mistakes, you'll survive too. The stories of his mistakes are very reassuring.

There is plenty of electrical theory in this book, but you don't feel like it's being shoved down your throat. Platt explains conversationally in examples, pictures, and short biographical sketches of some of the big names in electrical history. By the end of each chapter, you've absorbed a lot of material, without the feeling of exhaustion that comes from reading most textbooks.

Make: Electronics: I love this book!

More:
They call it "trouble" shooting for a reason
Jim Kelly's Make: Electronics lab update
Make: Electronics: "Teaching at its best!"
A Make: Electronics lab journal
Make: Electronics - Interview with Charles Platt & Gareth Branwyn
Make: Electronics and the 555 man

The phylomon project: collectible animal cards

Can your kids identify a Shiny Pichu but not a Procyon lotor (raccoon)? An open source initiative called the Phylomon Project aims to change that.

Experimenter iPhone app

The Experimenter iPhone app is chock full of timeless backyard science experiments. Sure, you could troll YouTube and find similar material, but the folks at Cramzy have done all the tedious work for you. And it's nice to have everything in one simple interface. Each experiment is fun, entertaining, and sure to spark interest in those lucky enough to participate. None of the materials in the 14 experiments are too exotic and most should be available from your local corner market. The video demonstrations are well done and each comes with an appropriate safety precaution. Be warned that this app is video intensive and weights in at a whopping 240MB. [via @gigamegawatts]

In the Maker Shed:

9780596514921-2T

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

January 25, 2010

Math Monday: Tetraxis puzzle

Tetraxis puzzle

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

People have been making geometric puzzles for centuries, with each design adding new twists. At The Museum of Mathematics, we have a large puzzle called the tetraxis, shown above. The name comes from the fact that the pieces line up along four axes. Most people are familiar with the 90 degree relationship between the standard XYZ axes, but are confounded by these parts, which line up in the directions of the four long diagonals of a cube. This puzzle was made by John and Jane Kostick, who incorporated magnets to make the parts lock together nicely. The outer shape comes from a family of related puzzles by Stewart Coffin, whose book The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections, gives instructions for woodworkers on making their own copies of many geometric puzzles.

Engineering Paradise

When thinking up a way to promote the awesomeness of engineering, IBM Fellow John Cohn did what came naturally - a music video parody of a Coolio track, of course! [via Adafruit Industries]

NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition

Want to design robots that excavate on the moon? I thought so. NASA is running a competition called Lunabotics for undergrad and grad students. The deadline for team registration is February 28, 2010. There are cash prizes and VIP Kennedy launch tickets up for grabs! [Thanks, Rachel!]

More:

January 23, 2010

R/C plane from trash

Twitter user ChristineMMTTM points us to this video record of the process of building a remote control airplane from junk that could be scavenged from most household trash. Projects like this are a great way to learn problem solving, and important concepts of aerodynamics. Could this be done with a full-size class of regular education students?

January 22, 2010

They call it "trouble" shooting for a reason

Over on the Hands-On - Make: Electronics blog, our new best friend, Jim Kelly, continues to blaze his way through the experiments in Make: Electronics. It's really fun to watch someone learning out loud.

In Chapter 2, Experiment 8, Jim learned an all-important lesson in electronics, the need to be persistent in troubleshooting a problem. When you're neck deep in it, it can be a frustrating and time-consuming process, and you frequently think you've examined everything that possibly matters. Then it turns out to be something so obvious you missed it, or so obscure, you never would have even considered it (and you only tried it in fit of desperation). The benefits of persistence is not only the resolution of your problem, but the thrills and "ahas!" you get to enjoy when you've finally figured it out.

Here's how Jim tackled, and finally resolved, his problem:

So, enter the breadboard. I've been wanting to learn how to use one of these for a long time... I always thought they were complicated (look at all those holes and rows and columns!) - what a pleasant surprise to find out that this thing isn't all that difficult to use.

Be sure to read over the sections on the fundamentals of capacitors/capacitance - as well as the warnings about attaching certain capacitors to the breadboard incorrectly. It's good stuff, but we all want to get our hands on the breadboard, right? Thankfully the author isn't going to have us tear apart a breadboard - they're not cheap!

So, after examining the circuit a few more times and comparing it to the drawing on page 66, I definitely understand how the breadboard facilitates building this circuit. I took all the components, inserted them into the breadboard, supplied some power, pressed the button... and.... nothing.

Zip.

So, here's where some patience and common sense come in. First, we know this circuit works, right? Without using the breadboard, I was able to build this circuit using clips, so it's got to be something I'm not wiring up correctly. So...

January 20, 2010

Maze-traversing oil drops

Physical chemist Bartosz Grzybowski and colleagues at Northwestern University have created a microfluidic system that solves mazes like a lab rat. The system is very simple--besides the maze itself, there's the dyed drop of acidic oil that actually traverses the maze, the basic hydroxide solution that fills the maze, and the acidic lump of agarose gel that marks the maze's exit--but results in an apparently complex behavior. The droplet at right actually took a couple of wrong turns and back-tracked to correct them. [via Neatorama]

Rubik's Cube lesson plans

Teachers, need a topic for an upcoming class? Why not teach the cube?

The You CAN Do The Rubik's Cube program is designed to get the country's youth engaged in math and science in a fun way! The Solution Guide and lesson plans have been designed to help educators engage youth in grades 3-12 and special education programs with hands-on education activities that are aligned with standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), State Curriculum Frameworks, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Lesson plans show teachers and youth leaders how to use the Rubik's Cube as a memorization, sequencing, problem solving, and confidence-building tool. Furthermore, the cube provides a visual way to teach math disciplines like fractions, measurement, geometry, and algebra - and sense of accomplishment!

The program comes with a kit packing cubes, "solution guides", DVD and CD, stickers, activity sheets and certificates.

More:

January 19, 2010

More playing card (and pencil) geometric constructions

Inspired by George Hart's work (our Math Mondays columnist), Flickr user fdecomite has been constructing these awesome geometric models out of playing cards, pencils, paper, and other materials.

Fdecomite's photo sets

More:
Math Monday: Playing card contructions

January 18, 2010

What can we do to promote DIY electronics awareness?

Multiple readers have pointed out this recent news item concerning an 11-year old student in San Diego who became the center of a police investigation after bringing his homemade motion sensor to school. Quite frankly, I found it completely heartbreaking.

Like all regrettable incidents, there were of course variables and circumstances at play which we may never fully understand. Instead of responding with bitterness and finger-pointing, I'd like to direct responsive energy into something more constructive by attempting to answer the question; What can we at MAKE & also the greater DIY community do to help inform the public's understanding of what we do? Particularly, in respect to DIY electronics projects and similar mediums which seem at risk for misinterpretation. Please share any helpful ideas you might have, large or small, by leaving a comment below.

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