Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Semester 2 of "Wired For Art" #MakerEd

We began semester 2 - a new round of "Wired For Art" - back in the beginning of February, with a few tweaks to get the kids' skills built up a bit more before launching into their personal projects.  Here's been our structure so far:

Week 1 - MakeyMakey intro and playtime
Week 2 - Intro to parallel v series circuits with alligator clip wires and LEDs
Week 3 - Coppertape circuit art
Week 4 - finish coppertape circuits and install laptop updates in prep for 3D printing

(Week 5 hasn't happened yet... we've lost a couple weeks due to student conference days and a student musical performance, but it will be a guest-speaker workshop on 3D printing, and their last teacher-directed project will be a soft circuit cuff with a personal 3D designed/printed "medallion" to hold the LED... Gonna be rad!)

Here are some of our outcomes so far:

MakeyMakey intro and playtime:




Coppertape Circuit Art! (Yes, that's a light-up "POOP" in the bottom left corner of the collage.)




4 comments:

  1. Awesome! How do you give your students feedback on projects like this?

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  2. Hi Heather! We don't give much in the way of formal feedback at this point... More informal, ongoing revisiting of developing craftsmanship expectations, support in mastering circuitry concepts, etc. It's interesting how differently I think about feedback in this "fine arts" class vs my more academic "science" class...

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  3. Nice projects. Your copper tape LEDs look gorgeous. Did they use bone folders or popsicle sticks? I will be field testing pop up card LEDs next week at my school and doing a 30 minute workshop at Jaymes school in NYC on the 12th. Any tips are welcome. Thanks Jenny Howland

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  4. Hi Jenny! We haven't used bone folders or anything to smooth out the copper... it has stayed smooth pretty easily! A couple tips:
    - put copper tape under AND over the LED leads to get a stronger current
    - encourage folks to get creative with their "switches." Folding over a corner of the paper doesn't always work excellently. See the Pokemon buttons and the "taco" above!
    - have LOTS of coin cell batteries on hand, because sometimes it takes several of them to get enough voltage. Our awesome pack-rat maintenance guy bought several thousand hearing aid batteries at some going-out-of-business sale for like $20, and now we're using those!

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