“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 »

Jean Adams' Honors Geometry class at Castilleja School in Palo Alto

A few months ago Jean Adams, a teacher from Castilleja School in Palo Alto, wrote to me about the OpenSCAD tutorials on our blog so she could use them in her classroom. ¹  Obviously, this got me interested, so I asked her to share more about her class:

I teach Honors Geometry at Castilleja, an independent girls’ school for grades 6-12 in the heart of Silicon Valley.  This year our school opened an “Idea Lab” in connection with Stanford’s Fab Lab and trained a group of teachers on several digital fabrication machines.  Among those machines was a cute, wooden MakerBot Thing-o-Matic.  I was immediately drawn to the homebrew feel of the community around MakerBot and frankly the machine reminded me of the Apple I.  A parent volunteer, Diego Fonstad, showed me the openSCAD program and I saw how wonderfully this software could help teach several concepts in my Geometry class.  I began to play with OpenSCAD by following MakerBlock’s tutorials on the MakerBot blog.  Eventually I adapted his tutorials for my classroom and my student’s learned OpenSCAD during two 50-minute class sessions.  They were then given time  outside of class to work on a final project which was printed on our school’s Thing-o-Matic.

The list of concepts that this project helped teach or reinforce is actually quite extensive.  During the year long course my students learn about union and intersection of geometrical objects, vectors, rigid transformations such as translation, rotation, dilation (scale in OpenSCAD), and the z-axis.  All of these ideas came together in the design of their OpenSCAD object.  Futhermore I teach a small amount of programming in the python language and their skills in that language transferred over directly into OpenSCAD.

Beyond any specific content learned through this project, I intended my students to practice using spatial reasoning.  A 2010 research report by AAUW entiled “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics” presents research that shows women can dramatically improve spatial reasoning skills in a short amount of time in order to close the gap with men.  ”If girls grow up in an environment with opportunities  to develop their spatial skills, they are more likely to consider a future in a science or engineering field.”  I found that students struggled with thinking and rotating in 3 dimensions, but by the end of the project had developed a robust ability to rotate their OpenSCAD objects in their mind.

A nice (and accidental) side effect was the chance for students to express themselves creatively in math class.  Diego Fonstad wrote, “The detail and breadth of their output exceeded what was required of them to complete the project. This underscores their latent creativity and desire to build and also demonstrates how this exercise tapped their intrinsic motivation and truly engaged the students.”

Jean’s class have shared their designs on Thingiverse, including the cutest and pinkest R2D2 I’ve ever seen.

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1. Seriously – what kind of class is teaching OpenSCAD?!  Are there any open seats left?! [↩]

Marius Watz' lattice structure, using Modelbuilder and The Replicator

Marius is looking for a few extra eyeballs on his Github Modelbuilder repository. Can you help?

He’s been using Modelbuilder to build lattice structures with his Replicator. But oh,

…did I mention I’m actually pretty bad at math? Doing computational geometry for a week straight has made me feel a little smarter, but all that does is make me better equipped to understand how little I really know. I can’t help but feel that CAD professionals would snicker at my minor victories considering that every feature I laboriously implement has been standard issue in every CAD package for over a decade. Still, the satisfaction of doing it yourself and knowing exactly how the code will behave makes it worth the struggle.

Kudos on pushing through to figure it out yourself! Check out Marius’ Flickr page, too. The distorted structures you can see there are pretty awesome.