Make: Online: Education Archives

Archive: Education

September 30, 2009

Math Midway

Last night PT and I got to check out the Math Midway (soon to become the Math Museum), including the square trike PT already posted. Check out their website and mine and PT's photos on Flickr. That other lovely lass in the pictures is Alicia Gibb from Bug Labs.

The Math Midway is in NYC until October 14th, at the Urban Academy, after which it will travel to the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, PA. This group of exhibits wants to turn into a full-scale museum, so if you're interested in getting involved, now's a good time!

Hinged transformation of triangle to square

The relatively straightforward swing-hinged dissection of an equilateral triangle to a square in this video is called "Dudeney's dissection" and has been known since 1902. For a gallery of hinged dissections, check out Tse-hsuan Yang's page at Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University.

September 29, 2009

Practical tutorial on capacitors by EEVblog

If you've ever wondered why there are so many types of capacitors, and how to choose the right one for your project, you should definitely catch the latest installment of David L. Jones' EEVblog. He's got a whole bunch of practical knowledge to share in his wonderful style. I sure learned a lot, even after working with these things for years!

Just looking for a introduction on how to use a capacitor? Check out MAKE presents: The Capacitor.

September 28, 2009

CAD modeling music video

I love the band They Might Be Giants. I love designing 3D objects on the computer. I love turning those designs into real objects. I love this song and video!

September 23, 2009

The Belonio stove

Alexis Belonio is an associate professor in agricultural engineering at the Central Philippine University of Iloilo City. In 2008 he received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for a rice-husk-burning stove he designed. Belonio's stove is not complicated, either mechanically or conceptually: A columnar metal burner with the addition of a small intake fan at the base to tip the stoichiometry of combustion towards oxidation, giving a blue, clean, efficient flame that leaves little or no residue. Traditional rice husk burners, by contrast, do not have this forced-air feature and produce a yellow, dirty, inefficient flame that leaves tar behind. The upshot is more efficient use of rice husk biomass and greatly reduced pollution from the many rice-husk burners in use today.

September 19, 2009

CD drive scrounged junkbots

After exploring the innards of our CD drives, students in my robotics class are coming up with some clever junkbots. Here are a few of the first ones, more to come as they evolve. In both cases, by the end of the period, these student designed and made devices that had been improved before the period ended.

As the school year begins, how do you help students understand the basics of electricity, manufacturing, and creating original devices? As a student, what are the best projects for the start of the semester or school year to get you excited to go deeper and learn more?

September 16, 2009

Mobile Art and Code is November 6-8th in Pittsburgh

Interested in the future of mobile computing? Have a killer application or art project that incorporates a wireless element, but don't know where to get started? Then you don't want to miss the Mobile Art && Code Symposium, which is taking place this November in Pittsburgh. Unlike traditional conferences, this one is aimed at anyone who has an interest in the subject, young and old. From their website:

ART && CODE is an event series and online community dedicated to the democratization of computer programming for artists, young people, and the rest of us.
This November 6-8, we continue our successful workshop/lecture series with MOBILE ART && CODE: Mobile Media and Interactive Arts - a symposium on the aesthetic and tactical potentials of mobile, networked and locative media. The three-day event will feature intimate, practical, arts-oriented programming workshops for popular mobile platforms (such as the iPhone, Android, Nokia S90, PBX telephony systems, and SMS hacking) along with an all-day series of free lecture presentations that contextualizes the use of these technologies in a variety of contemporary critical, artistic and design practices.

Conference registration is not yet open, but will be soon.

[photo by Golan Levin]

September 15, 2009

Fascination: Lynn Rothschild

A new video was just added to our ongoing series of interviews with notable Makers, sponsored by Dow Chemical. Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist/exobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, and faculty member at Brown and Stanford Universities, talks about her lifelong fascination with microbes. "I'm getting paid, really, to be a grown-up five year old," she quips, describing her globetrotting research into microbial extremophiles that has, in order to better understand the possibilities for extraterrestrial life, analyzed data from a radioactive spring in Australia and the top of Mount Everest, among other places.

September 13, 2009

The Steel Yard's Fall 2009 course registration open (Providence, RI)

Steel Yard 2009 Fall Courses

The Steel Yard just wrote in to let us know that registration is open for their Fall courses in Providence, RI:

Registration is now open for the Steel Yard's Fall 2009 Course Season!
The Yard is gearing up for another great season of building, cutting,
bending, and throwing. In addition to our regular lineup of courses we
have some really exciting new offerings.

In Hollowware with Patrick McMillan students will explore metalsmithing
and learn basic raising, sinking, and fabrication in order to form their
own vessels from copper sheet.

Students working with Heather Guidero in Casting: Jewelry and Other Small
Objects will learn the art of lost wax casting, a great method for
producing one-of-a-kind objects as well as a whole run of identical
copies. This course is a must for anyone interested in starting their own
jewelry business.

Eye of the Beholder is wheel and hand-building course just for 14 to18
year-olds. This new offering encourages students to look beyond simple
cups and bowls and explore the creative potential of the ceramic vessel.

The Steel Yard Course Listings

September 11, 2009

Attention Makers: Apply for a GO Ingenuity Fellowship

Got a wonderful invention or art project that you think will inspire the next generation of makers? The GO campaign is offering a number of GO Ingenuity Awards to help fund your idea. From their website:

The GO Ingenuity Award (GIA) is awarded to artists, inventors, and small business entrepreneurs to stimulate the next generation of "makers." Building on the momentum of Maker Faire Africa, GO Campaign will award one-year, one-time fellowship grants to individual applicants who are eager to share their skills with marginalized youth in developing countries in ways that educate and inspire youth to harness their own ingenuity. The GIA emphasizes the sharing of innovative artistry and technology in informal, hands-on learning workshops in places where youth already gather.

[via Boing Boing]

September 8, 2009

"The Elements" video

Today on Boing Boing Video, they premiere They Might Be Giants' new video ode to the elements. The song is part of the Giants' latest kids recording, "Here Comes Science." Cory has a review of the CD/DVD here. My son grew up with the Giants' awesome cover of "Why Does The Sun Shine?" It gladdens my heart to think of a generation of kids learning honest-to-goodness science through fun, quirky, joyful music like "The Elements" and the other tracks on this record.

They Might Be Giants: "Meet the Elements" music video (BB Video)

September 6, 2009

How-To: Classroom vibrobots

Vibrobots are an easy project for your maker classroom students and workshop participants. Relatively quickly, you can have people build their own small vehicle, construct a simple electric circuit and have the critter move around due to its' weighted motor. The materials are cheap or free, allowing you to encourage participants to take their creation home for further inspiration.

You may want to pair the vibrobot with the CD scrounging project. After scrapping the drives, you then have an excellent collection of parts perfectly suited for the vibrobot project.

Skills in this project:
Building electric circuits
Making a transportation vehicle
Working with the design process
Use of tools and supplies
Determining positive and negative voltage

Materials:
This project is so flexible that you can substitute for just about everything on this supply list. Really, look around at the junk you have and figure out a way to use up some of the debris on hand before spending your budget.
You can get all the parts you need from scavenging computer CD drives
Battery holder, you can buy them or have participants make their own
Motors
Wire and other conductors
Rigid materials for the body
Springs are nice for feet
Zip ties
Hot melt glue
Nuts/bolts/washers

Read full story

September 5, 2009

How-To: Program a person

When introducing kids to programming, it's helpful to get them into the mindset of programming. Having this experience will help them to get the concept that they are in charge of what the code does. They should also see that there is a lot of programmed behavior in the devices and systems in our lives.

Supplies:
People
Paper
Pens/pencils
A space to work in, tiled floors can be handy for calibrating moves

Tools
None

Concepts
Programming
Communications systems
Iterative or Design process

Time frame
This takes at least 20 minutes to explain and do. After that, you could use it as a filler activity, where you use it to illustrate a concept in the language that you are learning.

Mastery Objective
Students or participants will know how to create a very simple programming language so that they can command another person to perform simple tasks and explain where programming is present in other parts of their lives.

Process
Have participants get together in groups of twos or threes. Big groups don't work as well.
Each group will need a piece of paper and a pen or pencil
Each group creates their own code of simple commands.
Their commands will be written on the piece of paper and then spoken to the programmed person.
The programmed person should not have to read the code, it should be transmitted to that person verbally, or on slips of paper in a sequence.
The programmed person will then carry out the written code as accurately as possible.
Students and participants should use the iterative process, where they try their program and refine it as they go. If they don't test out the program, it may not do what they want, their may be miscommunications or sloppy code that the programmed person does not follow well.
Have each of the groups or pairs demonstrate to the rest of the group what they have programmed.
Each group in turn has a person who calls out the code, and another person who executes the code.
Each person should think of several objects or systems that use programming techniques in their daily life.

Keep it simple
Make a code of at least five lines of code, one command on each line.
They should avoid words like: "and," "next" and "then," which will have the effect of making commands more complex. Implied in the system is that the next line of code or simple command is "next" or "then."

Don't make it impossible
Keep the commands realistic for your situation.
If you are limited on time, they should not repeat movements or events dozens or hundreds of time.
If you are limited on space, they shouldn't have commands like "run for twenty seconds" or "jump eight feet"
If you have regular human beings, they shouldn't have commands like "jump up three feet" or "lift the maple table top"

Extensions
You could have them create a common syntax for their code, making it more consistent.
Create objects of groups of participants, that could all be commanded by one person acting as the transmitter of the code.

If you try this out, please let us know how it goes in the comments. Send in some photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool and tag it with ProgramAPerson.

September 4, 2009

Free classroom electricity posters

Looking for a way to liven up your maker classroom? How about some spiffy posters? No shipping hassles, here, these are pdf downloads. The files are on the large side, so your size limitation will be on finding a printer big enough to get the size you want. They look like 11" x17" should be no problem.

September 2, 2009

The NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program

NASA offers funding to undergrads and graduate students in a huge cross section of fields including physics, engineering, math, and computer science. The 2009 NASA ASP scholarship cycle opened Sept. 1. It's a great time to be in school, especially studying science and engineering!

HackPittsburgh: Intro to Arduino class a success

It looks like HackPittsburgh's "Intro to Programming The Arduino" class was a success. This video was made by one of the students after taking the course.

On Saturday, August 29, a dozen students (some coming all the way from Ohio and even one from Detroit) gathered at HackPittsburgh to explore this question. Each student received all of the parts necessary to make a "physical pixel" - a breadboard, a three-color (RGB) LED, three potentiometers, some resistors, and some jumper wires. The students brought their own laptop, Arduino (or compatible board), and programming cable.

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Family
Make: Arduino

August 31, 2009

Ready-made pedal-power

Here's a clever reuse of a plastic pedal boat as a ready-made power plant for a mechanical washing machine.

August 30, 2009

How-To: CD drive scavenging for parts

Old CD drives are a decent source for parts to make things from. Since the computer industry has encouraged manufacturing churn for so many decades, it is pretty easy to find at least a few surplus drives to dissect. Inside these dusty relics, you will be lucky to find DC motors, switches, gears, springs and more. The tools you will need are pretty easy to come by as well. From the parts you will find, you can make a number of interesting projects.

You can get drives from old computers, which always seem to be at the dump, on the sidewalk of some neighborhoods, out on the loading dock of the school, in basements and garages, etc. It is important that wherever you get them they come to you legitimately free of expectations. These will not be functioning drives after a few minutes of the project.

Teach your family to solder! Take a few pictures tagged as "MAKEcation" and put them in the MAKE Flickr pool by September 9th to enter to win a $100 Maker Shed gift certifiate!

Supplies:
Old computer CD drives (older ones often have better parts)
Plastic bags for storing parts (zippered half size sandwich bags are great)
Small cardboard boxes for storing the larger metal and plastic parts
Battery holder
Tape
Paper and pen
Digital camera
Paper clip

Tools:
Safety glasses
Small phillips head screwdriver
Straight screwdriver
Jeweler's screwdrivers
Pliers, needle nose or channel lock
Utility knife
Soldering iron
Wire cutters/strippers

Concepts:
How does it work?
How is it made?
Differences in technique and age of manufacture
Identifying electrical components
Getting and organizing supplies for future use

Time frame:
An hour or more is ideal

Mastery Objective:
Students and participants will know how to safely disassemble a CD drive or similar electrojunk for parts and project supplies so that they can name the parts inside the device, compare the varieties of manufacturing techniques to solve the same problem and organize the usable parts and components for future use in projects.

Process:
What do you have?
Probably the first thing to do is look at the exterior of the drives you have.
Make note of any markings on the drive. Some things you will likely find are the manufacturer, model number, read/write speed of the drive and my favorite: Date of Manufacture.
The date of manufacture will give you some context to judge the drives in your collection by. Often the older the drive is, the more "off the shelf" the components are.

Use your camera:
Take some photos with your camera or camera phone to show the process of taking the drive apart.
You can also have participants and students take pictures of each of the systems they find, and each of the types of components they find inside.

Case disassembly:
Put on your safety glasses.
Use a screwdriver to take the metal case off the drive. It will usually be 4 phillips screws on the sides that hold it together.
In taking off the metal case, try to keep it from getting deformed. The steel can be useful later. You may find that there are plastic tabs holding one of the pieces in place.
Try to get the case to just fall apart without having to be forced. Most of the time it will just come apart after you remove the screws and press on the plastic tabs.
If you do have to tug on the parts, you may have missed a screw under a sticker. If all else fails, make sure all of the eyes are protected, and pull it apart carefully, probably below the table.
Pop open the CD drawer by straightening out a paper clip and slipping it into the hole on the front panel. The drawer should open easily. You might even find a disc inside.
To remove the drawer, you may have to pry apart the plastic sides, or it might just come apart easily. Different models have varying designs. Be careful if you put force on it that the parts don't fly and hurt somebody.

Be careful not to Over-Disassemble!
You may find that there is a dc motor that is in a plastic housing that holds it in contact with a gear which could serve as a nice little drive wheel. Take it out, but secure it together so it can be used in a future project. If it doesn't stay together with screws or pressure fitting plastic, run a bit of tape around it to hold it.
You may also find that the CD reading eye moves nicely on its' slides. If it is controlled by a DC motor, this could be a neat system to use later.
Basically, look at the things you are taking apart, and see if they can be used as systems or components.
Securing the wires coming from the motor with a bit of tape will help keep them from breaking off later.

Motors and how to read them:
You should find two types of motors inside: DC motor and Stepper motor.

The easiest way to identify a DC motor is by looking at the number of wires coming off it. Most have just two wires. DC motors are controlled by sending electricity through the motor, causing it to turn either clockwise or counterclockwise. Sometimes you may find that there are several more wires going into another area of the case. These can be to an encoder that helps read the speed and direction of the motor.

Stepper motors have more wires coming from them, and often are built right onto a circuit board. These turn by receiving a series of pulses, each of which advances the motor one step. By controlling the timing and quantity of the pulses with a microcontroller, it is possible to precisely set the speed and even the number of degrees the motor will turn.

Save the good bits
As you go, put the useful parts into plastic bags or bins. Label the bags with scraps of paper for easy identification.
You should be able to find at least the following:

DC motors, usually one will open the tray, sometimes you will find a second to move the eye.
Gears to drive the mechanisms
Switches, either momentary pushbutton or other mechanical contactors
Headphone jack
Potentiometer
LED
Screws

Desolder the components you want from the circuit boards:
The headphone jack, LED, momentary switches and sometimes motors will be soldered directly to the circuit boards. You can use a desoldering braid and an iron to free these items from the boards. If they have fittings, you may want to keep the fittings and instead remove the headers that connect them to the board. You should be able to scrape the coating off the metal traces to solder the fittings to a wire for future projects.

Extensions:
Make a vibrobot.
Practice soldering and desoldering with the components on the boards.
Use a battery holder to power some of the things you find inside.
Use a fishing tackle box to store your parts in labeled bins.
Make a video explaining what you have found inside your CD drives.
Make a poster identifying each of the parts of a CD drive and telling what each does.
Use the parts of the drives to make something amazing!

So give it a shot!
You can try this solo, but it is definitely more fun scavenging old drives in a group with the stuff all ending up on the table. You can compare the differences and similarities between drives better in a group, and you can share observations about the systems. Having a nice collection of stuff to pick from is a great feature of the project. An added bonus is finding handwritten markings made by the people who made the drive. Give yourself and the group some time to explore what you find. In my experience, it takes a few hours to dig through the drives and then make something from the debris. You can do it in one workshop, or you can spread it over a few classes. Share your findings in the comments, and add your photos to the MAKE Flickr pool.

More:

August 29, 2009

How-To: Free DIY battery holders

In this project, we'll make battery packs essentially for free. If you need a lot, make a lot. If you need more voltage, add on more cells with couplers. If participants and students in your workshop or class all make their own, they can do it together, maybe even doing a manufacturing project to create many for future use.

For some time now, I have struggled with the expense and scarcity of battery holders. Costing anywhere from a dollar to three, they can raise the price point of a project, though they do look nice and work well. Since they are an item that most stores don't carry, you will have to order battery packs for projects that you intend to do. If you're planning a workshop or class with 25 people and want to use plastic battery holders, order ahead and pay up.

Plastic battery packs are also pretty easy to ruin if the ends of the wires are short-circuited accidentally or intentionally. A short circuit will heat up the batteries, which will then melt the plastic around one or both of the springs, causing the pack to fail. By making a battery pack, your participants and students can free themselves of the various barriers that purchased battery packs present for first run and experimental projects. For more formal projects, you or they may want to dig into the budget and buy some packs for a more polished look.

My first designs were done with cardboard from the recycling bin. I also made these with side by side arrangement. The way I am doing them these days is all in a line, which is probably not as sturdy or compact, but is definitely quicker. If you develop a better way of making these battery packs, please share pictures in the MAKE Flickr pool, and show us some links to them in action on projects.

Skills in this project:

Manufacturing
Trouble shooting and the design process
Identifying a conductor and insulator
Testing for electrical continuity
Testing for voltage
Designing for voltage

Materials you will need:

Duct tape
Tin foil
Batteries, AA or AAA are good to start with
Rubber band
Stranded wire

Tools:

Scissors
Utility knife
Wire cutters/strippers
Voltage/Ohm meter

Time Frame:
Half an hour, after you get the hang of it, you can make one in less or make several all at once.

Mastery Objective:
Students and participants will know how to make a 3 volt or more battery pack using readily available materials so that they can use them in electricity projects.

Process:
Gather your supplies.
Make the tubes
For each battery pack, cut 3 four inch strips of duct tape. One will be the coupler, two will be for end caps.
On each strip, cut a 1 inch square out of one end.
fold the strip in half, leaving exposed a 1 inch section at the end. Be careful that the other adhesive is not exposed (it could stick to the battery later)
Roll the strip onto a battery to make a tube. The exposed adhesive tab in the previous step should be the last section on.
Do this to make three of these tubes.
Make a coupler and end caps
Crunch up or fold up some tin foil and put it in one of the tubes. This will help ensure that there is good electrical contact between the batteries.
Put a battery into each side of the coupler. One should be positive end in, the other should be negative end in.
Slide a tube over each end of the exposed batteries.
Fold up a 1" x 2"section of tin foil so that it makes a flat band of foil. Make two of these.
Fold over the end a couple of times so that it is a bit thicker.
Put this thicker end over the end of one of the batteries in turn.
Place a 3/8" to 1/2" wide section of tape over the end of the battery and end cap.
Hold the end caps in place with a piece of tape. You will want to remove the tape when the battery dies or needs to be recharged, so maybe fold over the end to make a pull tab.

Extensions:
Test for continuity
Put your meter on either the continuity setting or the ohms/resistance setting. When you touch the probes to an object that is a conductor like two ends of a stripped wire, you will have continuity: the meter will beep in the continuity setting or it will show numbers in the ohms/resistance setting. Electricity can travel between these two points. If you do not get continuity, such as on a piece of plastic or glass, or if one end of the wire is not stripped, electricity cannot travel easily between these two points. This is an insulator.
Increase your pack's voltage
If your project needs 4.5 volts, 6 volts or more, you can add to the standard pack by slipping another battery onto the pack with another coupler. AA and AAA batteries are 1.5 volts each, so when you connect your batteries in series like this project, each battery you add boosts your voltage by 1.5 volts.
Add wires
Cut two stranded wires, about 2" to 4" long.
Strip the ends about 3/8".
On the end that will connect to the battery pack, spread the strands of the wire.
On the end that will connect to your circuit, twist the wires together. If you have access to a soldering iron, tin the wires to keep them together.
Test your pack and fix if needed
Put your meter in DC voltage mode and touch the probes to each of the wires.
The voltage for two batteries should read 3 volts. A (-) symbol in front of the number just means you have the probes on the battery backwards.
If you get 0 volts, you may need to press the pack together to get a better connection. In this case, you can hold the pack tighter together with a rubber band or carefully tape the caps so that they fit tightly.
Another problem that could give you 0 volts is that the batteries could be in the wrong direction. The negative of one battery has to touch the positive of the next battery.
Use your battery pack
You can use your new battery pack by twisting the wires on the pack to the wires on your circuit project.
You can also solder a 9 volt battery top onto your pack wires so you can use the standardized clip of the 9 volt system.
You can also twist your wires onto a connector cut from a power supply.

More:

Teach your family to solder! Take a few pictures tagged as "MAKEcation" and put them in the MAKE Flickr pool by September 9th to enter to win a $100 Maker Shed gift certifiate!

August 28, 2009

Make: Projects - Polycube puzzles from blank dice

A number of interesting assembly puzzles can be made from pieces consisting of simply joined cubes in various numbers and arrangements. Piet Hein's Soma Cube is a notable example, consisting of all the simply joined non-convex polycubes having four or fewer units. Generally, a polyomino or polycube puzzle is presented as an outline or volume to be filled in with a certain set of pieces. It is up to the solver to figure out how to pack the pieces to fill the specified form.

Among the more interesting of the polycube puzzles are the solid pentominoes. The flat pentominoes are commonly used in early elementary education programs, so many readers will doubtless be familiar with them. Extruding the flat pentominoes by one unit in the Z-dimension gives the set of what are traditionally called "solid pentominoes." They can be used to solve any flat pentomino puzzle, but also to create various 3D shapes. The 3D puzzles are considerably more challenging.

To make a satisfying polycube puzzle requires that the pieces be dimensioned very accurately, so they will always pack closely regardless of their arrangement. To achieve this accuracy with common hand tools is very difficult. However, blank dice provide a convenient and inexpensive source of accurate, precise unit cubes which may be joined to create the various pieces. The use of translucent dice is recommended, both because they look cool and because they're gauranteed to be acrylic and hence strongly bondable with standard acrylic cements. All the opaque dice I've tried to glue have proven highly resistant to adhesives of all types; I suspect they're made out of polyethylene.

Tools: