Monday, July 3, 2017

Kenetic Light Sculpture Project - Using Arduinos Part 2

The task I gave students was to do one of 2 things:

A) Create a kinetic light sculpture - literally, it just needed to move and have lights

OR

B) Create something that is useful for the school

I anticipated push back from my boys about having to do "art" in my class, so I wanted to preemptively strike and give them a second option (thus plan B was born).  That was hugely successful.  Most my boys realized that making something move and light up was not the end of the world.  In fact, several of them moved this to more of a "robotics" project where they had a car that could drive.

To do this, we had a lot of materials, generously supplied by a KSTF grant - here were just a few of them.  My full list of items can be found here (note: make sure you filter and sort in the top right corner for purchased AND unpurchased items to see them all).


Also, essential to this project were extra items I got from SparkFun - like motors, jumper wires, more LEDs, etc.

It was interesting to see students start with nothing, develop an idea, and then implement it.  It really pushed them to think differently about programing, circuitry, and problem solving.  During the week, a colleague of mine, Ryan, came to visit my room.  He comes from a science background so he had a different perspective than myself.

It was SO AWESOME to have him there.  I have been excited about what my students were doing and it was so fantastic to get another perspective!  Ryan mentioned that he noticed students had missed the fact that once their spinning motors started spinning, they were going to run into a physical restraint with the wires also getting twisted.  I hadn't anticipated this issue myself either.  Ryan also pointed out that engaging students in the engineering design process earlier in the project could be helpful.  Even doing a hypothetical engineering problem (OR BETTER YET... one of code.org's CS Discoveries problems from their problem solving unit) could help students develop a more coherent plan to start with.

I had given students a project organizer as a starting point, but it was really insufficient and didn't address the new issues that would arise in this project.  I reached out to our engineering teacher to see what he used - in hopes of being consistent throughout courses and he sent me this.

The end result was a lot of different projects.  Here are a few of them:


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