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.

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What does Tesla Motors mean to you?

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 […]

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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. […]

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Spanish students beat NASA

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 […]

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Well-documented robotic snake

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 […]

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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 […]

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