You know what they say! Always make one thing a day after Labor Day.

No one says that, but let’s make it fashionable. Liz Arum of the MakerBot Education Team has crafted a great list of “Daily Prints” for every school day in September. This list is a great way for teachers to kick start the school year with interesting things from Thingiverse and some interesting education to go along with them.

Here’s today’s:

Be sure to read the “Why am I making one?” section, too.

This project is an example of gears and for demonstrating logarithmic spirals. You could teach a lesson on simple mechanisms or logarithmic equations, or the Golden ratio.

Background
A logarithmic spiral, equiangular spiral or growth spiral is a kind of spiral curve which often appears in nature. It is related to Fibonacci numbers, the golden ratio, and golden rectangles, and is sometimes called the golden spiral. The logarithmic spiral was first described by Descartes and later investigated by Jacob Bernoulli, who called it Spira mirabilis, “the marvelous spiral”.

Check back every school day this month for a great Daily Print idea, and if you know teachers who might enjoy these quick suggestions, pass along the link. You never know who it might inspire!

Next Friday night, MakerBot will host a very special MUGNY (MakerBot User Group NYC) meeting at the beautiful Marymount School Fifth Avenue Campus right across from the Met Museum. Marymount is an an independent, Catholic all-girls day school that actually has a rocking fab lab full of MakerBots — so this is a special pleasure for us. What’s more, this venue allows us to host a special RSVP only (grab tickets quick here!) opportunity to do a walking tour through the Met Museum so that a number of the artists can share about their derivative works right in front of the originals!

At 6:30pm, MakerBot Operators, Thingiverse Makers, and the curious public will cross the street and join us at the Marymount School for refreshments, snacks, the latest community show-and-tell, and inspiring keynote talks featuring the Met MakerBot Hackathon and the Capture Your Town project that emerged: a chance for all of our community to dive in and digitize buildings, artwork, and other objects that they want to share with the world about where they live.

MakerBot User Group meetings are monthly meet ups for members of our world-wide community to get together locally to share what they have been up to with their MakerBots. The events typically include a featured guest or keynote arranged beforehand, and tend to attract a large crowd of those from the general public as well as those actively involved with MakerBot and Thingiverse — all are welcome!

Check back early next week for further details about the Hackathon artists, digital archivists, and MakerBot community members who will be speaking — and reserve your “5:00pm Pre-Event Demo and Art Talk at the Met Museum” and “MUGNY Event @ Marymount School” RSVP tickets so that you can receive instructions for attending this very special evening.

Thanks again to inspiring maker and educator Jaymes Dec for connecting us with the Marymount School.

There is still time to enroll your child in a very important learning opportunity, and good news: the price has dropped and the eligibility has expanded!

NYU Poly’s Center for K-12 STEM Education and MakerBot are combining powers to get kids introduced to 3D modeling and 3D printing. This is an excellent chance to give them a leg up with a set of skills that will become very advantageous in the near future.

Here are the details:

Where: NYU-Poly Campus
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY
Room RH 214

When: July 9th-13th, 2012 from 9am to 3pm daily

Who: Ages 10-13

Cost:  $500 $400/student (includes a lunch voucher good in our cafeteria)

Email [email protected] to find out more.

Click here to sign up!

Photo credit: CRAIG SCHREINER — Wisconsin State Journal

Big ups to Chris Mayer, a MakerBot owner and hackerspace founder in Wisconsin, who brought his Cupcake CNC, MakerBot’s first generation machine, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Entrepreneurship Bootcamp…and apparently drew a crowd.

Chris attended this program himself three years ago, and has since gone on to found the hackerspace Sector67. That organization can already boast some cool successes. Here’s one that Chris got to brag about:

[Sector67 member] Eric Ronning, won the UW’s 2012 Schoofs Prize for Creativity for the prosthetic hand he developed using Sector67′s 3D printer, a programmable plastic molding device.

It’s pretty cool to keep seeing people doing awesome things even with our earliest machines, and taking time to spread the knowledge. Keep going, guys! The future depends on it.

What have you done with your Cupcake CNC lately? We want to know.

Rick Pannen has put up two super sweet posts on his tumblr “Phlegmatic prototyping” about creating a good 3D model of a protein involved in Alzheimer’s Disease. Rick writes that his friend is pursuing a PhD in chemistry and wanted the molecule model for research purposes.

Little problem: the data for the molecule was just a bunch of points in space, and Rick’s friend really needed a model of the surface of the molecule. The open-source program BallView is perfect for this job. If you set that program to “SES”, it generates a surface model using all the atom data. Rick writes that the model below actually didn’t run too well through ReplicatorG, but repairing in NetFabb did the trick.

Now the interesting stuff. Using a custom 3D printer built with MakerBot MK6 extruders, he was able to make the molecule. Of course because of the shape, he had to use some support structure. Here’s what the molecule looked like in black.

The next step was to sand blast the model and cover it in white paint. Then, tediously, to add in some color coding for different atoms: Red = Oxygen, Blue = Nitrogen, Yellow = Sulfur.

It doesn’t look like the model is available on Thingiverse yet, but here’s hoping Rick throws it up sometime soon! There are several excellent related Things already up, which you can find under the Learning category on Thingiverse. Remember to categorize all your new uploads carefully. It helps people find these resources quickly and easily.

Teachers, heads up: here’s a great idea for using a MakerBot in the classroom.

This robot mashup project on Thingiverse is a way to get kids thinking about making, 3D modeling and design, and electronics. The files provided include 5 body options, 5 head options, 6 hat options, 4 hip options, and 3 leg options (plus 4 non-leg base options). That’s 4,200 different robot possibilities! Thingiverse user Oblomobka writes that the printable files available are meant to be combined with foam pieces, making the possibilities even more numerous.

In addition to the body parts, the kids used conductive play-dough to make some simple circuits for powering LED eyes. The Thingiverse page links to the homemade Squishy Circuits play dough from the fantastic AnnMarie Thomas.

As always, someone has shared resources on Thingiverse for everyone everywhere to take for free. Maybe the next person will figure out how to add in some motors and get these robots moving.

If you’re a parent in the New York City region, take a look at this great summer workshop being organized by NYU Poly. “On the Move” is a week-long program targeted to students entering 6th, 7th, and 8th grades in the fall, and it is focused on 3D modeling and 3D printing. These are the skills that will set the next generation of creative kids apart from their peers. Get them started now!

We’re especially proud to recommend this program, since the MakerBot Education Team, Liz Arum and Jon Santiago, will be leading the instruction. Here’s some info from the website.

This workshop will focus on 3D Printing, one of the most disruptive technologies around. 3D printers allow anyone at any skill level to become producers, inventors and artists, and they are changing the way we create and learn.  During this one-week intensive workshop students will learn how to make and personalize 3D models with free, readily available software like Tinkercad, OpenSCAD and Blender. Our theme will be “On the Move,” and we will be focusing on making gears, interlocking parts and other physical mechanisms to make our creations, walk, shake, dance and fly. No prior modeling, computer or printing experience is necessary.

Where: NYU-Poly Campus
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY
Room RH 214

When: July 9th-13th, 2012 from 9am to 3pm daily

Cost:  $500.00/student (includes a lunch voucher good in our cafeteria)

Questions? Email Susan Hermon at [email protected]

I know I’m not through my backlog of WYMB pictures, but just look at the one we got a minute ago via twitter!

These awesome, eager, MakerBotting 4th and 5th graders come to your screen from Boynton Beach, Florida’s Poinciana Elementary Magnet school for STEM. I’m going to have to dig deeply into teacher Kris Swanson’s blog now. I want to know all about what they are making, how they are designing, and how you get a dozen 10-year-olds to look that happy and excited for a picture.

A sincere happy Teacher Appreciation Week to all of you teachers.

“It’s important to take the time to color inside the lines.”

“12 x 12 = 144″

“The Treaties of Westphalia heralded the era of the nation state in Europe.”

“An adverb describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.”

“Do your best; nobody can ask for more than that.”

“The First Law of Thermodynamics is you do not talk about Thermodynamics.”

Think about it: there was a specific point in time when you learned each of these things. (I double checked all but the last one, but it sounds right.) We learned these things, and we did it through the persistence and patience of great teachers, at home or in the classroom.

Whether your formal education is ongoing — hey, young readers! — or ended 50 years ago, there is never a bad time to reflect on the people who chose teaching for their career. It is a demanding and often thankless job, and we at MakerBot want teachers to know they are always on our minds.

If you are a MakerBot owner, you have the chance to give the teachers in your life a special gift. It could be a customized nameplate, a desk organizer, or the old standby, an apple.

I made an apple yesterday on my Replicator and brought it around to some of the people here at MakerBot. These are people in our company who come from lots of different backgrounds, and I was personally curious to know which teachers inspired them and got them here. Here are their answers.

Adam, Co-Founder and CTO
Is there one teacher you remember fondly?
Mrs. Wolff, physics teacher.

What was one thing that person taught you that stuck?
That there’s no luminiferous ether.

What would you say to that teacher if you had a chance?
Why the hell wasn’t that part of the basic curriculum?

Read the rest of this entry »

Credit: Caroline Poe Photography

Check out this post from Austin-based design technologist (at frog) Gregg Wygonik, who attended what is now officially known – by proclamation of the Mayor! – as ACE Academy Innovation Day. I never get tired of reading about young kids who need no explanation of what 3D printing is or why it’s powerful.

Gregg is an enthusiastic MakerBotter, and he answered our call to action (wittingly or not) for a community member to go represent us at this cool day-long science fair for young innovators. Apparently this wasn’t like “normal science fairs where kids have dioramas of the earth’s layers.” No, these kids brought “innovative forms of lightning rods for houses, cool robots, 3D LED matrix cubes, and a new type of ‘flame in a can’ over which they were roasting marshmallows.”

And then one of the youngsters asked Gregg why he was running Windows on a Mac, while another schooled his peer on time-lapse YouTube videos of 3D prints in progress.

Heh…kids.

Were these kids exceptionally engaged in the world or is that just what kids are like these days? It seems that 3-year-olds can handle iPads about as well as 63-year-old novices, and whenever I see a child near a 3D printer they just get it. That’s exactly what Gregg experienced at ACE Innovation this weekend.

While we got questions from parents about how it worked, the kids all seemed to know…

Credit: Caroline Poe Photography

If the kids who grew up with early generations of personal computers grew up and revolutionized the Web, what will the kids who grow up with 3D printers do?

Thanks, Gregg (and his colleague Brooks!), for spending the day with some awesome kids! It is amazing to see people from our community out there spreading the fun and freedom that go along with MakerBotting.

The video below shows a little more about what the day entailed. It almost makes it seem like kids invented The Replicator, but hopefully they were at least inspired to hack away on it!