Digital Design

We can all agree that times are not like they have ever been within any of our life spans (at least for those of us under 100). What has been debated passionately is how we, as educators & school systems, should best work with this ongoing pandemic. Some schools have responded by going online to synchronous classes while others have decided to use asynchronous learning and still others have decided that they don't know enough about access and an expectation for online learning is not equitable so they sadly have their students doing nothing. You can go on any social media and see countless hot takes complaining about what not to do and exaggerating these scenarios. Parents are either dismayed by the huge amount of worksheets sent home and apps to download or saddened by the amount of time their kids now have with nothing to do from school. On the educator side "Students shouldn't be looking at Zoom for 8 hours a day" is one of my favorite disconnected complain...

The time has arrived where there is no argument about the place of technology in education . We need to rely on tech to help everyone with delivering education from a distance as we are sheltering in place and we need to do so in an intelligent and effective manner without just bumbling through a Zoom video conference for an entire class period. Be available for question, but don't expect students to sit there and listen to you lecture for even 20 minutes, much less an entire 70 minute period as is the length at my school. I've pasted the tips here and then again below with examples and additional explanation. Distance Learning Tips for 9-12 Classes Here are some quick tips to help you in designing the online experience for both you and your students. If you find it easier to read I have a google doc here with these tips laid out . Formatting gets weird in Blogger sometimes. Try to keep your online experience as similar to your class experience as possible so that the...

I have the great fortune of teaching a Digital Design class at Convent & Stuart Hall in San Francisco. As part of designing the class I've gamified the progression of lessons into levels. Upon completion of each level students earn a badge. Here is the final Level for Team Makerbot, designing a Codeblocks vase using loops they create in Tinkercad's block coding feature, Codeblocks. This app is a great example of the exciting intersection of art, science, math & tech and serves as a great visual to help students visualize what exactly is happening as a computer runs through each line of a loop.

How to screen record, speed up my video& embed into my blog: Step 1: Start a Screen Recording by opening QuickTime Player, selecting File → New Screen Recording Step 2:  Click on the red dot to record. For our purposes we will record our voiceover in iMovie after speeding up your video. If you would like to record audio at the same time click the arrow next to record and then select the microphone. Step 3: Drag a box around the area you would like to record or simply click to record the full screen. When the small stop sign appears you know that you are recording. When it is on, but dim (as below) it is preparing to record, but has not yet started. Step 4: Design as you would normally. Confirm you are recording by noticing the stop sign is white. When you want to stop recording click on the icon. Step 5: Save your screen recording immediately by going to File → Save & choosing your Digital Design Folder .  Save your work according to the week a...

Follow @lmcarey I've been intrigued at how easily you can go from the simple to the complex in Tinkercad . The entry point is ideal for students as young as kindergarten or 1st grade and I'm using it for my Digital Design class, a visual arts class using digital tools and hardware including the laser cutter and 3D printer. Using the hole and group features allows you to make your CAD model uniquely complex. Here is the link to make a photo into an .stl file that you can import into Tinkercad . Here are also a couple of great links from instructables on glow circuit assembly and 3D printing with circuits . I've also used the codeblocks feature to make repetitive designs in Tinkercad with great success. Links to explore & learn more... The Convent & Stuart Hall D2A Page Digital Design Blog Design To Action Blog Inquiry & Education Blog   Follow @lmcarey Tweets by lmcarey

Digital Design Student Work Introducing Digital Design 2! The Class I've Always Wanted to Teach, but needed to come into existence. The series of Digital Design 1 and 2 is meant for our 9th and 10th grade students here at Convent & Stuart Hall in SF. One of our goals is students as producers of meaningful work as opposed to memorizing and regurgitating content. This is a push for teachers to engage students in meaningful, higher-order thinking and engage each student by connecting their interests and the world outside the classroom to the content of the class. Education is NOT moving away from memorization and lower level thinking as quickly as we should for a variety of reasons. Resistance to making this paradigm shift is a result of the challenge of developing classes that are cross curricular & prepare students for roles they would actually have in the professional world. Teachers have a lot on their plate and those who excel oftentimes receive more on their plate ...

This year I'm trying to document my example work to serve as how to and instructional videos. I'm either using Quicktime and iMovie when I'm in more of a time crunch or trying to use Screenflow once our school license if finalized as there is a lot more I can do with that program as I found out in our workshop at the end of last year, but I'll need to spend some time tinkering in order to figure out the functionality more. Students are using TinkerCAD to design a name tag for their mailboxes. Here's is my demo with a hipster mustache as my overall shape.

The 9th grade Digital Design has recently been working on curating their artwork and finding their favorite work to share for the upcoming show, Art for The Heart at Convent & Stuart Hall. The students have gotten into using some powerful tools including Adobe Illustrator and TinkerCad to design before taking these design to our laser cutters and 3D printers to make their ideas a reality. Many have had great success using an exciting new function in TinkerCad that allows them to create their own unique shapes by writing code that includes loops. Developing a basic understanding of a loop and then seeing it execute step by step is an excellent feature in terms of allowing students to grasp what a loop is and how it works. Above Matthew Lim's artwork, Swirling Cynosure, is pictured. Matthew says,  "I like how I was able to repeat and rotate a movement and was able to create such a cool product." Several students have also used TinkerCad to make light boxes ...

Above are the initial design in TinkerCAD & the 3D print using a copper filament. Coding With TinkerCAD After teaching a semester of Digital Design I've had the opportunity to retool it this semester with several ideas and goals in mind that I've developed during the course of the year. I have especially thought about how our high-school students can be setup to approach a variety of classes in our curriculum with a unique perspective and set of tools that they've gained as a freshman in Digital Design. An exciting connection between algorithm and art is the new Codeblocks feature in TinkerCad. Creating geometric patterns of shapes in a recursive way leads our art to mimic a number of structures we find beautiful in nature, like the snowflake. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to guide my students in creating something beautiful while gaining an improved understanding of angles and recursive thinking. I screen recorded the video below during my firs...