teachmake

Make your own Wii smartboard

Rather than spending thousands of dollars per classroom, students and faculty could make them in the building. With a project like this in your school, this could be a great way to do some electronics, system design and get a taste of mass production of the components. While this may not fit in to your current curriculum to have students build these systems, it could be a great way to collaborate across subject areas, or it could be a great after school club activity.

Continue Reading December 30th, 2009 Chris Connors20

Teaching open problem solving with Scratch

Alex has been using Scratch to teach problem solving and programming with kids. Here is the balancing cat.sb file. Here is Alex’s solution.sb . You will need a copy of the free program Scratch. Try it out, post your results on the Scratch site, and let us know what you think.

Continue Reading May 2nd, 2009 Chris Connors6

What does Tesla Motors mean to you?

When Chad was a freshman in my high school program, he was talking about wanting to do a car project. The teenage car project is a time tested pursuit, an opportunity to learn many of life’s lessons, learn tools, techniques, create a useful product. Chad is currently a freshman at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where […]

Continue Reading March 30th, 2009 Chris Connors46

Vibrobots!

Bill VanLoo used the Vibrobot project from MAKE, Volume 10 with his students at Honey Creek Community School. The 4/5 technology classes built Vibrobots for one of their project this year. Vibrobots are small electric bug-like creatures that are built from a small metal or plastic enclosure (think mint tin), a motor, and some ingenuity. […]

Continue Reading March 24th, 2009 Chris Connors

Spanish students beat NASA

A group of student makers took kite arial photography to a new level: weather balloon photography. They certainly are undercutting NASA’s budget, spending very little on their project, and fabricating most of the structure and electronics themselves. Check out Gareth’s previous entry on the project. Mail Online has a decent writeup. Nice of them to […]

Continue Reading March 23rd, 2009 Chris Connors18

Well-documented robotic snake

This is a great example of a well documented group project. Their wiki has loads of information. There is sample code, parts lists, descriptions of the circuits, explanation of the components. Photo from Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems The robotic snake consists of a head segment and several body segments. The head segment houses the […]

Continue Reading March 16th, 2009 Chris Connors

US FIRST regional competitions

A few weekends ago I had the chance to check out the Northeast regionals for USFIRST in Boston. Above, Matt and Chris of Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School, Team 61 tell about being involved. Here is a segment of one round of the competition: Norwell High School has a great robotics program mentored […]

Continue Reading March 7th, 2009 Chris Connors2