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Spark Lunch! Students & Faculty Laser Cutter



This past Friday we invited K-12 faculty and staff into the Spark Studio here at Convent & Stuart Hall in order to learn how various students and faculty are currently using the machine in both practical as well as creative capacities.

We had a superstar presenter from the 3rd grade who has mastered the workflow for tracing and cutting on the machine. He created his g-hack plane (pictured below) from a drawing and printed it on proofgrade draftboard.

We also had an 11th grader come in to show the work he's been doing for his IB Visual Arts Portfolio as well as personal interest. He's created the game board pictured above for Settlers of Catan primarily using the laser cutter and was the first at our school to start laser cutting pictures. He is now working on a cube with each of the faces laced similar to that pictured below.







I was also excited that several of my digital design students came in to share their work! Some of them have really started to wrap their heads around creative uses for the machine and all of them are on their way. They are now wrapping their photo projects, printing a set of 3-5 themed photos on cardboard & one on wood, a couple are pictured below. We've experimented a lot with power settings including convert to dots vs. vary power and various precision power settings. The bridges below are both on full power with convert to dots on the left and vary power on the right. A lighter power setting of 80% was used for the engraving on the bottom.


As we wrap our first unit on laser cutting and get ready to go on to the 3D printing unit I've found that  in the future it may be best to start half of the class on laser cutting and the other half on 3D printing so as to allow them to work without waiting for a machine. This particularly became an issue when we started engraving photos as engraving takes far more time than cutting. I'm also working on finalizing the process of developing their final projects and have appreciated the insight I've received from other member of the Visual Arts 





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