What is the STEAM Lab, anyway?

Welcome to the STEAM Lab! 

Curious about what we do? Check out this presentation for more information. 

Here's our current wish list of tools and supplies.

What do you want to make? The Random Materials Build Challenge

Students in the After School Program are regular users of the STEAM Lab. We often do Snap Circuits or play around with our set of 3Doodler pens, but sometimes students just want to mess around with materials. On days like this, we engage in a RMBC - Random Materials Building Challenge. This kind of activity promotes divergent and creative thinking, problem solving, and engagement - rarely do I have students off task when we're doing a challenge.




Each student (or team, if working with teams) starts with the same set of randomly selected materials gleaned from the recycle piles in the STEAM Lab. It could four drinking straws, a 5" length of twine, a small cardboard box, and a marble. Add some basic adhesive like tape, and go for it. 

You can set a competition framework - provide an objective and award points based on achieving it, or creativity, etc - or a more open ended project (invent something!), and see what happens. 

These are endlessly scalable, able to be differentiated for a variety of age groups, skill levels, objectives... You can allow students to trade materials with each other, or add in a "bonus ingredient" halfway through the allotted time... however you set it up, the big thing is to provide an open space for students to explore and create something neat. 

3D Printing-palooza

With two 3D Printers (a Monoprice Maker Select Mini and a Flashforge Finder), SDMHS students are able to physically manifest some of their cool 3D designs. In Mr. George's Geometry class, students created complex polyhedron shapes to explore measurement of volumes and angles. Printing them off gives us an opportunity to examine why some 3D prints work well and some fail.

For example, a shape with parts that are thin or spindly can be too weak to survive removal from the print bed. Thicker 'arms' generally make for better prints.

 

Getting to see a design fail is instructive - it forces students to analyze what went wrong so they can improve it, requiring critical thinking and problem solving.

The other conversation we have about 3D printing is around responsibility and originality - we print with a purpose, and we don't plagiarize. Many students have downloaded already-created items off of sites like Thingiverse and 'remixing' them by altering the files in Tinkercad or similar programs. While this is a great learning experience, helping students understand how complicated designs are made, my rule is that I won't print things that students didn't design themselves. I also won't print just anything, for any reason. Given the amuont of waste plastic that 3D printing produces (both on the manufacturing end and on the user end) we're working to source recycled 3D printer filament, and we hope to purchase a filament recycler at some point. In the meanwhile, I'm asking students to hold off on printing that cool wannabe fidget spinner or spiky nametag - things that will be discarded shortly and end up in the waste stream.

What I will print is student-designed prototypes. One student has a plan to create custom Magic card carrying boxes. Before he invests money in purchasing a roll of filament of his own, we're printing a prototype for him so he can see his design in real life, make adjustments, and perfect the design before production. Before he moves on and his production run starts, we'll sit down to create a business plan, complete with costs and timelines, so he can really understand what the project will mean. 

Just a little soldering practice

It's awesome time in the STEAM Lab when students tackle projects that stretch their skills. It's even better when it's something that stretches a teacher's skills as well. Best ever? When we make something work again. Today, a student taught another student and Ms. Capwell how to solder. We repaired a string of LED Christmas lights - something that would have been thrown away otherwise. However, after snipping the wires, cleaning up and re-soldering the connections and putting it all back together again, we once again had glowy, LED goodness. 

Student Project-in-Process

It turns out, if you really want to stand out in a dance crowd, just put some wearable LEDs on your dress! One SDMHS student is currently learning to program sewable LEDs to add some sparkle to her prom dress.

Using components and tutorials from Adafruit, it involves attaching 25 LED 'neopixels' that glow red, green, and blue, and are programmable to sparkle when the dress moves.

The project is the perfect example of what a student can accomplish in the STEAM Lab. Over the course of making this, the student will learn how circuits work, how to solder connections, how to program an arduino, engage in light clothing design, and end up with a final product that is unique and sure to stand out in a crowd.

When it's done, we'll share video and photos, so stay tuned!

3D "Doodling"

We've been having fun in the STEAM Lab lately, messing around with some of the cool new tools we've gotten through our Donors Choose grant (if you missed donating to the first one, and still want to support us, we've got our second grant ready to go here!).



Our latest activity was constructing little boxes with our 3Doodler Create 3D printing pens.



Unlike a traditional 3D printer, these pens are free-form 3D drawing tools (3D 'doodling'!), which allows students the creative freedom to create free-hand, without needing to wade through a CAD program first.

 Little projects like this box are a good way for students to become familiar with the materials and the tool, so they understand how it works and what the tricks are for making projects come out smoothly. An understanding of what a tool is capable of means they can unleash their creative side when it comes to designing and producing projects for their classes.

The 3Doodler Create can use ABS or PLA plastic, and also comes with a neat flexible plastic that stays bendy even after being printed. Because it uses the same plastic type as our 3D Printer, this means we can combine more traditional 3D printed products with a more free-form 'doodled' product, expanding the range of what students can do.

Isn't this just a computer lab with junk in it?

Now that the STEAM Lab is open to students and classes, people have been passing by and asking a lot of questions. One of the themes of people's comments has been surprise that the STEAM Lab looks...  not that different from the old computer lab.


It's true that we've kept a healthy number of linux desktop computers laid out in a lab arrangement. These will come in handy for graphic design, video production, programming Raspberry Pi computer kids or Arduino electronics, etc. But the real thing is that people seem to expect heavy woodworking machinery, or a bank of 3D Printers.

While many school and municipal makerspaces have tools like these, what makes a makerspace or STEAM Lab successful is how it's used, rather than what's in it. Would it be handy to have a chop saw or a power drill? Sure! But can we do the work we need to do, and support the creative tinkering of our students, with only a handful of basic tools and supplies.