Make Magazine http://makezine.com/
Boing Boing www.boingboing.com
Wikipedia www.en.wikipedia.org
Fine Woodworking Magazine http://www.finewoodworking.com/
Popular Mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/
Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/
NASA Tech Briefs http://www.techbriefs.com/
Gever Tulley talks about seven things kids should learn, regarding tinkering with mechanical things– voiding warranties, disassembling dishwashers to figure out how they work (and maybe even learn how to fix them!)
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html
http://www.stevestackpole.com/2009_SITE/PAGES/HOME/HOMEPAGE2.htm
Small Parts, Inc
MSC Industrial Supply
McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply
Using Lego toys in the art classroom, as an adjunct to teaching kinetic sculpture, and as a means to foster cross disciplinary education.
The aesthetic of Lego as a legitimate art medium is debatable, but the benefit of play with Lego as a teaching device is well recognized. In a kinetic art classroom at the high school level, the science lessons pertaining to physics can be leveraged to a great degree. Many high school students, as a consequence of MCAS, have formal training in basic physics, so the concepts of levers, rotational movement, torque, and whatnot should be familiar, if only in theory. Lego can help transfer that theoretical knowledge into real understanding as the students have an authentic artistic experience by building kinetic artworks.
Fred demonstrated, using Lego, how levers work, how gear reductions work, and so on. Each lesson took about ten minutes, and was a basic demonstration of the concept in Lego, followed by hands-on by the students with Lego.
The students understood a particular lever or pulley system, but didn’t explore in depth.
I think a small change would improve learning. In Fred’s demo, students were occasionally left wondering what the application of a mechanism would be– if it took several turns of a gear to get one revolution on the other end (so a lot of energy going in with little return), what was the utility of that gear reduction?
How then to improve this? Make a practical application for each mechanism. Giving the students a quick task would solidify the concept further, because now they have at least a sense of what they can do with it.
A STEM teacher can augment this learning, but such technical learning should be left for part two, in favour of unstructured play with levers and gears. Formal knowledge of how to calculate gear ratios will be useful when the kids have a prospective application. “I want to make a carousel, where the horses chase each other in circles, making two turns for every one that the carousel does” will need to be calculated. Learning that gears and motors can be connected together in the first place, to make horses chase each in circles on a carousel, will arise from play.
Learning a given mechanism beyond levers might require examples from real life– students can visualize a see-saw as a class 1 lever. They’ll see a class 2 lever as a wheelbarrow. A class 3 lever could be seen as a fishing rod. Similarly, examples will be needed for pulleys, gear trains, and the like.
In making the basic demonstration, ten minutes per mechanism is needed to demonstrate and allow time for the kids to create their own in Lego. Ten minutes might be given over to students to sketch out some ideas of how they might use that mechanism in an artwork.
Teaching automata is an entry point for arts and STEM integration in the classrooms. Children can have a hands-on science/engineering experience in a single paradigm that addresses their artistic needs in an authentic way.
The magical endpoint of learning doesn’t happen on its own. It’s important to integrate with the STEM faculty in a meaningful way, where all sides discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and how they can contribute and detract from the educational objective. The physics teachers might not have a robust grounding in the arts. The art teachers might not have a good idea of how to express engineering concepts in scientifically valid ways. However, the science teachers will be able to discuss the whys, while the art teachers will have the practical know-how to apply that abstract learning in the real world.
In a half year course (assume 180 total days in the year, so 18 weeks) at the high school level, it’s safe to assume the kids are in the classroom daily, for about 45 minutes/day. Any art can engage the artist for a lifetime of study, but valuable, high quality lessons can be designed that can occupy a student for a week, and these lessons can be built upon to culminate in a longer-term project that could occupy a student for a month.
The tough hurdle to overcome is that fewer and fewer consumer products are being made these days with the aim of being repaired. Mass production has reached the stage that for most things, it’s cheaper to replace than repair. As a result, this “fix it yourself” ethos has fallen by the wayside, and with it, the mental skills needed to design mechanical objects that perform a discrete action. To counter this, some quick lessons are needed in how to build mechanisms that perform different functions. But the fly in the ointment here is that our “throw away” society has devalued facility with tools and fabrication techniques. Initially, it may be necessary to facilitate learning by creating a collection of ready-made parts and components. In this way, the focus can be kept on building mechanisms, with tool use an ongoing lesson, rather than having to start “cold” by teaching kids how to cut a circle out of wood, etc. The enthusiasm of making things remains high as the children realize quick gains. Later, after they’ve seen how their ideas can be realized with a little more knowledge, they’ll have the patience to sit through basic tool use, knowing this will help them realize their grand ideas to a greater degree.
The first couple weeks of the course would be spent with playful experimentation– less emphasis on tangible deliverables, and more of an emphasis on learning the concepts of mechanical automation. How does a lever work? How can I connect a rotating cam shaft to a series of levers to create a sequence of actions? The students would document their learning through “laboratory notebooks”, where they make sketches, unfolding the mechanical actions they observe. Toys akin to “Fridgits” can serve as ready-made mechanisms to inspire their experiments. Thoughtfully designed objectives, handed down from the teacher, can spur children to learn specific concepts: the teacher will have more foresight as to which mechanisms will provide the best bang for the buck, and additionally, the teacher can assign a different mechanism to different students/groups, seeding the ability of the students to teach each other as they uncover design problems later in the course.
Potential lessons–
How does a tape measure retract? (flat retraction spring)
How does a seat belt tensioner grab when you need it to, but release during normal operation? (Angular momentum)
How does a reduction gear work?
How can pulleys increase mechanical advantage?
How does each lever in a mousetrap function?
How do cams in an automotive engine work?
After the first couple of days of deconstructing mechanisms, the kids are broken into teams, and given a task to create an action to create a mechanism that will perform a particular mechanical task– wave a toy plastic hand, raise and lower a rabbit from a magician’s hat, lift a load out of a “cargo hold” and put it on a “dock”. These tasks should be designed to require a grounding in lessons already learned, and should require a level of synthesizing new knowledge commensurate with their abilities.
After a week or two of playing and synthesizing knowledge of how mechanisms work, the course should turn to disassembling (visually or actually) moderately complex mechanisms, in an effort to cement new mechanical knowledge. Games can be created where teams compete against each other to explain the workings of a mechanism in the best time.
New Works: Prints, Drawings, Collages
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 – Sunday, May 1, 2011
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=10269
