Melt HDPE Plastic For Projects

I wrote about this a couple years back and I have significantly refined this process so I figured I would provide an update. I still find melted and flattened HDPE plastic to be a useful building material for projects as long as the project specs require something simple like a box, backing, or frame. I've developed a pretty simple workflow that anyone can do with limited tools.  

Hacking Salvaged LED Displays (Part II)

Good news! I just found a discarded VCR with an LED display. That means it's time to salvage the display and make a project out of it. While the last post on 7-segment displays was a single digit, standard display, this one actually turns out to be 10-segment with non-numerical segments. So it will be an exercise in figuring out how a non-standard display works. In this post I will go over my process for hacking a display like this. If you're interested in doing this for a simple, standard 7-segment numerical display see this other post.

Makerspace Project: LED Side-lit Acrylic Signs

One of my favorite projects over the last couple years to do in our maker-space classroom is side-lit acrylic signs. The project has evolved a bit as I have improved the design of the signs and workflow for students and it is now in a place I really like. 

Use Scratch to Make Interactive History Timelines

An 8th grade history teacher I work with wanted his students to make their own timelines of world historical events as a way of tying events together over great spans of time and constructing their own trends. It took a while to find the right software platform because I didn't think Scratch would be capable of representing such a dense amount of visual and text information. He also wanted them to use a slider as a tool to navigate through the information and I thought that would be hard in Scratch. But after playing with it I found it was absolutely possible.

LightLogo Kaleidoscope Project

I am pleased to offer instructions and material files for making a LightLogo Kaleidoscope! I have been thinking about doing this for many months and finally worked out a design. If you have any improvements on this design please do share!

Create Object Multiples With a Script in Unity

It's not very hard to make a lot of some object in Unity, much easier than copying it many times. I used these instructions, Instantiating Prefabs at Runtime, to learn this, but I'm adding the twist that the item I'm multiplying is an imported Beetle Blocks 3D model.
Import Your Model. I'm importing this cool L-System tree by Eric Rosenbaum. See this post for more about importing 3D models from Beetle Blocks to Unity.

Build VR Worlds From Tinkercad and BeetleBlocks Models

To get yourself and your students set up for building VR apps for iOS with Unity, see this post for Unity 5.6+, and this post for Unity pre-5.6. The latter post also demos several possibilities for importing 3D content into a VR world that will work in all versions of Unity. Here I want to write about an option I skipped over in that post but has really interesting possibilties, creating 3D models in Tinkercad or Beetleblocks, and importing them. This process allows students to experience on a life-size scale something they are probably 3D printing as a small object, which can be mind blowing.

Make a Video from a Processing Sketch

I needed to do this and found the steps challenging enough I wanted to keep them here, and maybe they will be helpful to others. I needed to take the words in a static wordle-type presentation and animate them, so they move around a bit. Then I needed to add that animation to a video of a dance.

Make Your Own Virtual Reality App for Google Cardboard on iOS

(These notes are relevant for Unity version 5.5 and under. Here is a new post that covers Unity 5.6, when the Google Cardboard SDK was integrated into Unity build settings, making some of this obsolete.) I thought Google Cardboard was neat when I first saw it but a couple days ago I started playing around with creating 3D content for it and I'm blown away with the possibilities. I want to give a survey of some ways 3D content can be experienced in a Cardboard VR app but I'm not going to go super in-depth with any of them because each one is its own endless rabbit hole. The biggest hurdle, especially for making an app for iOS (as opposed to Android) is getting your Unity and XCode environment set up. Once that's working the rest is pure fun and amazement.

LilyPad Arduino In the Classroom: Interactive Shirts

Last summer as a participant in the Constructing Modern Knowledge conference I had the opportunity to develop a project with the LilyPad Arduino (and meet Leah Buechley!). I worked with a wonderful group of educators to prototype a hat that lets you know with LEDs when you should apply sunscreen. I had only prototyped circuits with the LilyPad before, never actually sewing one into a project, so one big thing I learned during that project is that embedding the components into fabric involves as much problem solving and time as programming and prototyping the circuit.

Code a Photobooth Program with P5 and a MaKey MaKey Controller

Creative student controller design!

This turned out to be a really fun project that my students can do quickly. We're using P5 to code a Photobooth program that streams the webcam and applies different filters the students choose. Plus we're adding a MaKey MaKey as a controller to work a little with

Daisy Chained NeoPixel Ring Flower Garden

pic.twitter.com/OOh0bXBzns

— Erik Nauman (@openblackboard) March 25, 2016

I've had this recessed frame kicking around for a long time and finally came across a good use for it. Inspired by the story of a student's flower garden Logo program in Teaching With Logo by Molly and Daniel Watt, I picked up some NeoPixel rings at my local go to hobby store, Tinkersphere, and set about learning how to daisy chain them into one circuit.

Lynn's flower garden

Gif Loop Coder Is An Animation Microworld

There's a new JavaScript programming tool called Gif Loop Coder that is providing me with endless fun. GLC provides a bunch of shape objects and an environment to play with their attributes and then run the resulting image as a tweened animation. Giving an object a single attribute, such as a fill color, will give it a static

Teaching HTML Coding with Chromebooks and Drive

UPDATE 2/1/17: This was great while it lasted. But it seems Google no longer provides a hosted link for html pages in Drive. Too bad.
Making web pages with HTML and a little JavaScript is a great way to introduce middle schoolers to text coding. Over the years I've introduced 6th graders to web coding using syntax coloring programs like Notepad++ and Text Wrangler, plaintext editors like Text Edit, and visual editor Dreamweaver. But this past year our school moved to Chromebooks and I had to find a cloud-based solution for HTML editing.

After trying several Chrome apps I settled on HTML Editey. Chrome Dev Editor seemed like the

Games and Controllers With Scratch, MaKey MaKey, and 3D Printing

I first wrote this post a year ago. This past year I revised a couple things as I did the project again, and the revisions will be noted.
We got a Makerbot Replicator 2 last December (now a year-and-a-half ago) and one of the projects I came up with turned out really well, and I think is worth sharing. My 7th graders designed key press controlled games in Scratch, then designed hand-held controllers with embedded switches, and we connected MaKey MaKeys to the leads on the switches for a great game experience. The highlights

Animate Poems With Scratch

Some of the most successful tech integration collaborations happen at unexpected times. Our 5th grade English teacher, Jenny Kirsch, asked me to help brainstorm ideas for her students to somehow animate excerpts of poems they had written. It was meant to be a quick end-of-year activity, a fun way for the students to extend and present their work. What resulted was a very nice opportunity for

3D Print Pagoda Project

Our 5th grade history teacher was doing a study of Vietnam with her class and wondered if her students could make and print pagodas. After looking at some examples and doing a couple test prints I settled on a general design that featured hexagonal or octagonal base with openings on some or all sides, which was repeated

Can Middle School Kids Create iOS Apps?

The Problem

No question about it, Apple does not make it easy to write apps for iOS. I take the fact that the Apple Developer program license is only free to university programs to be just one sign that Apple does not expect many students in K-12 to be making apps, no matter how much teachers may want them to (and they do!). I'm not talking about rare whiz kid 12 year-olds who follow enough tutorials and have enough guidance and a fairly good idea to make an app and get it in the store. I work with teachers who want to integrate app-making for iOS into their science curriculum, with 50 students developing

Arduino waitForButtonPress function

Lots of programming robotics languages (RobotC, leJOS NXJ, Cricket Logo, NXT-G) have functions that allow you to suspend processes while waiting for some kind of input. My robotics students most learned about leJOS NXJ's Button.waitForAnyPress() method. When we moved on to programming Arduinos one of them wanted to use the same concept to run a sensor calibration routine in setup(). So we had to make one, and it turned out to be very easy. She was initially trying to do something complicated with boolean variables but I remembered using this simple construct in

Controlling NXT Robot From the Keyboard with leJOS NXJ

Bad GUI for robot control

(UPDATE: So this was all well and good as a proof of concept but we found when we brought the motors into the mix the motors were too slow to respond to direct commands. We learned a lot in the process, though.)

I worked up a proof of concept in leJOS NXJ I'll be teaching my high school robotics students soon for a method of controlling a