Final Project (11-2)

I'm been thinking a lot about where we can go from here.  How do we, as a country, move forward?  I feel like the reason we're in this mess in the first place is a lack of communication between sides.  It's easy for us to sit in our educated bubble and share articles with each other and feel right, but we are not the majority in this country and no one outside of the bubble is hearing our thoughts.  I think one solution is to start communicating with people outside of the bubble.  Respectful conversations where we hear each other's opinions, hopes and fears, and hopefully exchange facts.  I want to create an online forum to facilitate these conversations.  I think I will make the creation and promotion of this forum my final project.  My words were 'Creative Code', 'Community' and 'Performance' so I think this idea will fit well.  To begin I bought the domain name endthebubble.com and I used the VersaCamm vinyl printer/cutter at my work to create stickers advertising the site.  I think the performance element will involve me standing somewhere public handing out the stickers to advertise the site.  If I can afford it I want to buy some cheap bubble wands to hand out with the stickers too.  Before I do any of that though I want to get the site up and running, and hopefully have some posts already up on the forum to get people started.  I'm thinking it will be a Wordpress site and I will learn about how to tweak the codes a bit to make the site more customized.

3D Modeling (11-1)

Yina and I worked together on this project.  After playing with Tinkercad for a bit and figuring out how it worked we decided to find a design on Thingiverse to print.  We wanted to make something small and functional.  We ended up finding this great dinosaur skull hook design.  I asked one of my coworkers to print the design for me on one of our fancy 3D printers.  The printer prints support material alongside the ABS plastic, so you can print more intricate designs as long as you're willing to chip away the support material afterwards.

Yina and I then met again to work on something new together, since the dinosaur design was just something we pulled from Thingiverse.  We also wanted to try printing something on the school's printers.  We decided we would make rings since they were also small and functional and would be easy to design in Tinkercad.  We played around with a bunch of different shapes and techniques and made some really funky rings, but unfortunately they were too funky for the Makerbot.  Even with supports and rafts added, the printer kept malfunctioning when we tried to print the rings.  We did get some interesting raft remnants though.  Yina and I then deleted the more complicated rings from our design.  We will go again tomorrow and try to print just the simpler rings.  Hopefully we can get it done before class!

Since teaching myself 3D modeling was a personal learning objective, I decided to spend a little extra time over Thanksgiving break teaching myself some more complicated techniques.  I downloaded Blender, a very powerful and free 3D modeling program, and I watched a few tutorials on Lynda.  I took what I learned in the tutorials and began experimenting to create my own forms from scratch.  I created the first figure by starting with a rectangle and subdividing and extruding faces.  The dancing lady in the background of the first figure was just a test of a different idea that I didn't end up following through on.  The second figure I created by starting with a sphere.  Once I had the basic shape of the face in place I refined it a bit with the sculpting tools.  I sent the first figure to Shapeways to get printed in ceramic, which was surprisingly cheaper than plastic.  The second figure I asked my coworker to print at work again.  I'm probably not going to get away with doing that any more, but it was worth it for these two small models, and I'm really happy with the way the head looks!  I haven't gotten the ceramic figure from Shapeways yet, but I'm excited to see how he turns out!

Feedback (10-2)

I really loved Zhenzhen's glitch project when I saw it in class, so I went first to her website to try it for myself.  At first I couldn't figure out how to make it work, but my roommate helped me set it up and we played around a little bit with the code.  We even logged into my roommate's github account and sent Zhenzhen our code changes we had played with.

 



I thought that Trisha's Scratch piece was a really brilliant way to teach kids new words and color theory.  I definitely want to keep this idea in mind once I start teaching.  I could have students who finish early work on Scratch games that teach them art concepts, and even eventually design their own!

Then I spent a really long time playing Katherine's game.  I really love the different reactions for each type of obstacle! 

I watched Sophia's stop motion animation videos and shared my thoughts on those.

I watched Eric and Trisha's Impact 25 project video again and commented on that on Eric's blog.

I commented on Yina and Yechen's Impact 25 project on Yina's blog.

Finally, I watched Regina's video project again and commented on that. 

Lasers and Vinyl Cutters(10-1)

I've been thinking a lot about the election recently and what the results will mean for our country.  I'm trying to find some meaningful ways of responding to all of this madness.  I created the first piece on the laser engraver by engraving and etching onto large pieces of cardstock.  I was thinking about the time Trump called Hillary a nasty woman during the debates.  Before November 8th, women took the phrase on as a joke.  We wore shirts saying 'nasty woman' to show our support of Hillary and to turn the insult into something that showed our strength.  After November 8th the insult stung again.  Now the shirt feels like a badge of self-loathing and it sums up my post-election feelings fairly well.  The majority of white women voted for Trump, so I'm having trouble feeling proud of my identity right now, not that I was ever particularly proud of my cultural heritage.

Scratch Thoughts (9-2)

I really enjoyed working with Scratch.  I think it is the perfect tool for introducing students to coding.  The building block format of the codes gets kids used to the idea of sending directions to a computer in chunks, the importance of clear language, and the importance of proper location and sequencing.  The fact that they can peek into other codes and use chunks of other people's codes for their own ideas allows students to make far more advanced projects, and to learn from other people's ideas.

I decided to challenge myself on this project.  I wanted to make an interactive animation using my scanograph of Trump's face.  I decided to do all of my own coding work from scratch, so I didn't use any example templates or bits of code.  I created my own sprites too, except for the balloons at the end.  One big challenge I encountered was figuring out how to get Trump's nose to grow convincingly.  I did all of my image editing within Scratch, which was it's own challenge.  I created a backdrop first with my original scanograph edited so the background color was more uniform and Trump's nose looked normal sized.  I then created a Sprite with the scanograph and edited the nose to look  slightly larger.  On each costume of the Sprite I created a slightly larger nose.  I had to edit the background each time to match up perfectly with the others.  The first thing I noticed when I went to play my animation was that my costumes weren't aligned, so Trump's face looked like it was flickering.  Because Scratch does not have ghosting, I had to spend a ton of time adjusting the center of each costume until they lined up perfectly.  I decided the ear, top of the head and chin would be my calibration marks and I erased sections of these on each costume and adjusted the centers until they lined up perfectly with the background image.

I was a little challenged by the format of the code as well.  You are limited by the building blocks that Scratch provides you with, and the options to build your own blocks didn't quite do what I wanted.  I had to end up figuring out a way around the issue.  Instead of having one Sprite react to the location of another, I had the Sprite send a message that started the other action.  I also played around with timing a little bit, synching up the timing of each Sprite so it looked like they were reacting to each other.  These sort of work arounds would be good for students to experience too.  If they get frustrated or stalled at any point the teacher can ask them, "What are you trying to achieve? Do you think there are other ways you could make this happen?"  If a student is really stumped, the question could be brought to the whole class.

Scratch is a great tool for students.  They can use it to bring their own artwork to life, or create something entirely new.  I would have my students start out with a specific objective in mind the first time they use Scratch, since the process of trying to figure out how to use the code to accomplish their objective would be a really valuable learning experience for them.

I enjoyed working with Scratch and I really like the project I created with it.  The best part about Scratch is the fact that the code is always open for further editing.  After I published my project I decided I wanted to add to it and adjust a few things.  I reworked my code several times after publishing and it updated everywhere instantly, even in the version I had already embedded in my blog.

The Results Are In...(9-1)