Digital Design

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...

Our Digital Design class took a field trip down to the Autodesk Gallery to explore the wide variety of innovative applications that computer automated design has helped make possible. We explored how CAD is used in countless fields including architecture, medicine, gaming, robotics, renewable energy and augmented reality. In the picture above we are exploring how AR can be used with topography to simulate the flow of water based on the relative elevation of the sand students physically arranged with their hands. Check out the video below to get a better sense of how it works. Following our tour of the gallery we had a tutorial in using Fusion 360 to build a chair. The video below gives you an idea of how quickly they could use the symmetry of a chair in order to create a design. It's amazing how quickly imagination can become something tangible using these relatively new tools. I'm curious how much this experience will impact our students' ability to address the many...

In browsing through tutorial videos for Tinkercad I came across this video, a timelapse of a watermelon being created .  Cool stuff, but fast-paced on timelapse so I consulted with one of our 4th grade TinkerCad experts here at Stuart Hall and we figured out the steps he used. Check it out below and start making your own Tinkercad custom parts. Digital Design Students here at Convent & Stuart Hall will be starting on this tomorrow.