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

Controlling 8 X 8 LED Matrix With the MAX7219

At first it was annoyingly difficult to get this LED matrix working properly but after putting it down for a month and coming back to it I suddenly have it working. We have a spiral staircase leading up to a Mac lab and my office and the student and teacher traffic always leads to an annoying jam when people

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

Keeping Multiple Electroluminescent Wires Bright With An Arduino

I recently helped a student with a nice, provocative installation with kitschy religious imagery that used EL wires to simulate a neon sign. She had a border, made by a yellow wire, framing three words in orange, each made by its own wire. She wanted the border to stay lit while the words blinked on and off. If you've ever worked with EL wires you will know that if they have the same power source, such as an Arduino (with El Escudo Dos controller) the more wires that are lit at once the dimmer they all get, since the voltage is shared. She really should have done the words with one wire but she

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

Radio Shack DIY 3 X 3 LED Cube Project

This project is really fun! Lots of people have posted their experience putting it together so I won't do that, but after recovering from a bit of soldering problems what I find challenging, or just tedious, is figuring out exactly what hex codes to use to create arrays for you own programs. I did figure out lighting up individual LEDs 1-9 on each level to make these two patterns, shown one after the other here:

Better flow https://t.co/tYNVi27yKW
— Erik Nauman (@openblackboard) March 20, 2014

Hands On Tech: Making Ceramic Tiles

Inspired by the brilliant work of Gary Donohue and Josh Burker, I have been working on a project with some of our art teachers that has exciting possibilities. It started with Gary describing his workflow that allows elementary students' line drawings to become 3D printed pieces. Then Josh took that in another direction with 4th graders using Turtle Art to make patterns that can be printed as presses for making clay tiles.
One of our art teachers said this is the idea that fills in the missing link for him with 3d printing--the link between hand-made artwork and digital manufacturing. Other teachers responded similarly, feeling little affinity for a machine that prints digitally designed objects until they could see how hand craft can be a vital part of its use.
I'm working with a high school art teacher and her ceramics class. I made a Processing sketch they can use to generate patterns from several different shapes. Check it out, it's here: http://openblackboard.com/processing/shapetile/.

Conceptually the code of the program is very similar to the one Josh presents above for Turtle Art. Each shape object is made up of a shape method, called by a row method that draws the shape across the window (and a second offset row if you set offsetEvenRows to true), called by a makeRows method that repeats the rows top to bottom. The amount of horizontal and vertical overlap is determined by the slider numbers you give the shape, as well as the size of the shape.

After configuring the shapes they way you want click the save button and download the image. You will want to tweak it before you get your final pattern.
The next step is to crop the image down to what you want just for the tile, so open it in Preview, or some image editor on a PC, and crop down to the desired area. Since you probably want the tile to repeat horizontally and possibly vertically as well this may be tricky, especially if you are aiming to have a square tile.

Save the cropped image and open it in Illustrator. Now you will trace it to prepare it for conversion to a vector graphic. Click Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options. Check Preview and spend some time trying the different Presets. When you have one you like, click the Trace button. At first I tried Detailed Illustration on this one, but when I completed the next step, importing to Tinkercad, I saw that the preset did something very different than I expected, so I retraced it with the Lettering preset and that worked much better.

Click Save as, and choose SVG.

Now in Tinkercad use the section in the upper right to import the SVG file into a new design. It will come in bigger than you want it, so scale it down, holding shift while you drag a corner to keep the aspect ratio.

The height will have decreased as well so raise it back up to about 6mm. Then add a 2mm layer to tie it together. 

And now some results! I can't wait to see them glazed.

A Machine Asking To Be Remade

I've been having a great time teaching students about 3D design and printing, and helping them print things they need. From robot scoops to ears, it's always an exciting surprise to find out when the printer can be a useful tool for learning. One of the more interesting ways it serves as a useful tool is in printing parts for itself. I've found two of these opportunities so far. Early on I could see that the filament tube on the Replicator 2 came out of its clips on the back easily when the extruder had to move towards the back of the build plate. I found a filament tube upgrade on Thingiverse that has worked perfectly.

Our @makerbot printed a part for itself! An upgraded filament guide. pic.twitter.com/TCKS2JbQXE
— Erik Nauman (@openblackboard) February 10, 2014

Then recently a student's dad brought in a few spools of filament to provide more colors for printing. One of the spools has a much smaller hole than the standard Makerbot spools. So I found a spindle, again on Thingiverse, modified it a bit in Tinkercad, and now the spool fits perfectly.