Author: Lensyl Urbano

Marionetting with AI

A student of mine wants to do a presentation about AI that is completely AI generated: they’re even thinking about generating the slideshow five minutes before doing the presentation, so they’re not tempted to edit it too much.

I love the idea, because I suspect it will highlight some important questions about AI use by students, and in society in general. As structured, the student would end up just being a front person for the AI. Although they would have posed the prompt, pretty much all of the “cognitive” work would be done by the AI. It should open up discussions of ideas such as agency, critical thought, and control in the relationship between humans and AI (even beyond current LLMs).

Makerspace 2025

As we’re constantly adding capabilities to our Makerspace, it’s useful to summarize our capabilities. I’ve broken it down into Computer Controlled Equipment, Analog Machines, Electronics and Coding, and Computer Hardware, Software and Design sections.

Computer Controlled Equipment

Laser Cutter/Etcher

The Universal 60W laser we use regularly to cut and etch 6 mm thick wood (1/4 inch) and acrylic. The bed is 24×18 inches. It also has a rotary tool to mount water bottles and glasses, and we’ve made adaptors to mount pens (though that’s still a work in progress).

Design is done primarily using Corel Draw and Inkscape, but we usually send print jobs using Corel.

3d Printers

We recently acquired a Prusa XL to go with our Prusa M3, though we have a couple other Prusa machines that were donated that are in the process of repair. The XL has a large print volume, can do multiple filaments, and is substantially faster than the M3. We’re still putting it through its paces, but so far everything looks great.

These days, most student-designed prints are made using TinkerCad, though I have students in my classes use OpenSCAD to do parametric modeling. One of my high schoolers is interested in Fusion 360, and I’m hoping they’ll be able to give a couple classes on it soon.

Vinyl Cutter

Our vinyl cutter can handle rolls up to 24 inches wide, and we’ve used it to make lots of stickers and signs for school (like for the chicken coop). It is limited to the colors and types of vinyl we have on hand (I get removable vinyl for obvious reasons) but student can bring in their own materials.

We use inkcut to send svg files to the cutter, but design is usually done with Corel and Inkscape.

CNC

We currently have an Inventables CNC with a 75×75 cm bed that we use for carving plywood, MDF (and to a degree epoxy resin), and solid wood pieces (we have made wooden swords of oak, pine, and maple).

Jobs are sent through Inventables’ Easel web-based app, mainly by importing svg files. We are still working on an effective procedure for passing Vcarve designs through Easel.

Embroidery

We do have an embroiderer that we’ve used to embroider student designs onto fabric and clothing. You can switch the machine for sewing.

Designs are made in Inkscape using the Ink/Stitch plugin.

dye sublimation printer

We have a printer dedicated to dye-sublimation, and have used it to make prints on wood, acrylic, and water bottles (the Middle School business made a decent profit making water bottles of students and their grandparents on Grandparents Day).

Designs are usually done with Corel Draw and GIMP.

Analog Machines

Lathe

We got a medium sized lathe with a 12 inch throw this summer, which students have used to make all sorts of bowls, vases, mushrooms, and pens. Fallen trees from storms over the last year have provided our work material, so we’ve had to figure out how to work with green wood (high moisture content), and different types of finishes.

Our turning tools use carbide tips, and we’re still exploring the variety of square (radiused), round, and diamond-shaped tips available.

tufting (Rug Making)

One of our alumni sent in a rug he’d made with a tufting gun, and the students liked it so much we had to get a tufting setup. We’ve had a number of rugs made, but it takes a while, so most progress is made on interims or during the summer camp. Now that we’ve figured out that you can use non-toxic Elmer’s glue on the backs of the rugs, we can do it all in the Makerspace (and don’t have to leave the rugs outside for days to de-gas).

epoxy

Students have used epoxy to make everything from river tables, to chess-boards, to coasters, to earrings. We’ve acquired quite a variety of molds over the years. We’ve had to dedicate a special table for the epoxy projects because it gets pretty messy.

Carving

We’ve picked up a variety of chisels and tools for carving, and students have demonstrated impressive patience in using them to create, mainly, cooking utensils (one student tried to do a bowl before we got the lathe). We’ve also had to get a sharpening stone setup (that we’ve also used on the non-carbide lathe turning tools).

Spray Paint Art

A couple years ago, one of our students spent a lot of time exploring spray-paint art, especially making planet paintings, so we now have system and a lot of spray paint (and graffiti remover for when things spill over onto work surfaces) . Planet painting has become a popular part of the Makerspace Summer Camp among the upper elementary kids.

Electronics and Coding

SolderinG

Our Weller soldering station gets a lot of use, and has been great for doing detailed work like soldering PCB parts and electronics repairs. It is, of course complemented by wire-strippers, cutters, and tools (the ifixit tool kit has seen a lot of use, and I am amazed that we more-or-less still have all the bits after about 5 years).

Printed Circuit Boards (PCB’s)

We have figured out a decent process for designing our own printed circuit boards (PCB’s) using Fritzing and having them made by pcbway.com. Our PCB designs have mainly been to make it easier to connect Raspberry Pi Picos to LEDs, sensors, and other components. We do have quite a collection of components (resistors, transistors, terminal blocks etc.) to go on the boards.

LED’s and Coding

One of the primary ways I introduce coding is by having students make lamps using individually addressable LED strips connected to Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers. So we do have a stash of Picos, Pico W’s and WS2812 strips.

Microcontrollers

Although we use Raspberry Pi Pico’s for most of our micro-controller needs (they are cheap and we have a system for working with them–based off circuitpython), we also have a number of other types, including Arduinos (used more for robotics).

Computer Hardware, Software, and Design

Tablets (iPads and Supernotes)

Students have done a lot of their initial design work on our Makerspace iPads (mainly using Procreate), but this summer, we had one student make all of their drawing on the Supernote e-ink tablet which made it much easier to transfer the design files over to the computer since they could send both vector (pdf) and raster (png) images to Corel for final finishing and printing to the laser.

laptops

When the lower-school switched over to Chromebooks, the Makerspace acquired about a dozen of the Thinkpads that were being retired. These have been great for us, because we switched them over to Linux and have mounted them on the walls to use their touch screens as interfaces.

However, since the Middle schoolers now have Chromebooks, and we have not figured out an easy way for them to program the Raspberry Pi Picos, or even to do website building, using them, students tend to check out the Makerspace laptops to do their micro-controller and LED work.

Oblique Strategies

I had the chance to sit-in on a wonderful guest class by a local artist, Blaine Deutsch. He got us to try Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies approach for when you’re stuck on something. It’s a set of cards, each with a short phrase aimed at rejiggering your thinking. I got the card below:

You can find the very nice card sets (and other merch) on Eno’s Oblique Strategies website, but there are also lots of webpages that will throw up a random one for you, including my own:

e-Ink Notebook in the Classroom: A Handwritten Wiki

I recently rediscovered e-Ink tablets, and ended up getting myself an A6 sized Supernote (Nomad). And I really like it. Despite being someone who has walked around with a gridded, pocket notebook for years, I’ve found that I quickly switched over to taking all of my notes on the tablet. It’s very similar to writing on paper, and the tactile differences are more than made up for by the ability to have multiple notebooks with me at all times, and have them all connected by links. It’s basically my own personal, handwritten wiki: something I wish I’d had for the last 20 years.

First page of my Makerspace Network notebook. Note the list of devices on the left that link to the specific note about that device.

Tech in the Classroom: An Argument for e-ink Tablets

My acquisition of this device has coincided with a renewed discussion at our school about the appropriated technology policy for the middle and high schoolers, that is a response to the current movement for retrenching on technology in the classroom, and indeed, banning devices like cell phones in schools. I think these e-ink devices are a qualitatively different category of device that warrant a different approach compared to phones, laptops, and even the more general-purpose tablets like iPads.

What I like:

The type of device I like are the ones specifically designed to be notebooks and not much, or very little, more. Specific highlights:

  • Links, links, links: The ability to easily make links from the text/drawing in one note to another page in the note, or another page is the feature that made me opt for the Supernote instead of the other e-ink tablets like the ones from Boox and Remarkable.
  • The handwriting and paper-like feel is not like the iPad and similar glass-surfaced tablets, with much less distance from the tip of the pen to the writing on the tablet. The difference between them and pen-and-paper is very small. The Supernote, in particular, foregoes a front light to minimize the pen-to-writing distance. There is evidence that handwriting is better for learning compared to typing (e.g. Ihara et al. 2021), and while they found no significant difference between pen-and-paper and writing on a tablet, I find that the tactile difference is important to me. I’ve not been able to use an iPad for note-taking, though a number of my high-school student do and have continued using them in college.
  • The ability to keep all of your notes in one place and on one device is enormous for my students who use the stuff-it-in-the-backpack method of paper organization. It’s not, to my mind, as intuitive and satisfying an organizational method as a binder with sections and color-coded tabs for each subject, but, there are significant number of students who can’t seem to make the binders work. Personally, I’m not using the device as a student, so I need a couple dozen notebooks to keep track of everything I’m doing, and I know, from years of trying, paper has some severe limitations.
  • The low refresh rate make them pretty useless for video. This is a big advantage when trying to create a distraction-free environment. This is a result of the way the e-ink technology currently works, and, I think that if this changes as the technology “improves” it will make these devices less appropriate for schools.
  • Few distractions, if any: no notifications and limited internet connectivity by design.
  • Black and white: This is not necessarily, entirely an unalloyed good, because I know some of my students make extensive use of highlighting in their notes.
  • No AI writing assistance: One of my students using the Goodnotes app on an iPad had the unwanted experience of the app trying to answer their math question for them, which I presume is because there’s now an AI in the program. The AI got the question wrong, but it would probably have been worse if it had gotten it right. It seems hard to overstate how problematic it is for the AI to be providing unsolicited answers to a student trying to learn by working through problem sets.
  • EMR styluses: These electro-magnetic resonance styluses don’t need charging or pairing with the device, so I’ve been able to use my stylus, which I was using to write on my Supernote, to make marks on my students’ Kindle without having to do anything (it was amazingly satisfying).

Caveats/Uncertainties

  • Not all of these devices have open formats for their notes, so there is the non-trivial concern about data loss as proprietary formats evolve or companies go out of business. This is the key issue I have with the Supernote. It is on their road-map, but I’ll continue to be concerned until I actually see it. That said, Max Mujynya has the excellent PySN library of python tools for working with Supernote notes.
  • Handwriting to text: This is less relevant in math, at the moment at least, but I’m unsure when this type of text conversion is useful to a student trying to learn English or History, and when it is not.
  • Printing and sharing: We’re still figuring out the best way to share notes between devices (especially different companies) given the closed note formats mentioned above.

Since I’ve been using (and gabbing on about) my device constantly, my students have noticed and one of them recently acquired a Kindle Scribe for math class. We’re still figuring out the details about the best way for them to do their and share it with me: right now they’re going to try using a different note for each chapter’s assignments, and submitting the file to me as a pdf. I should be able to mark it up on my device and send a pdf back.

A Note on the Supernote

I’m almost all-in on the Supernote specifically because of its ability to wiki (see above) with the one caveat about the currently closed note file format). But the other feature specifically designed to capture my attention is the fact that it’s built with interchangable parts. You can take the back off and change the battery and the motherboard, which means, hopefully, I can easily upgrade just the motherboard when a better one (X3 perhaps) becomes available. There’s even a slot for a Micro-SD card.

An A6 Supernote Nomad, the A5 Manta, and a selection of EMR pens I experimented with. The pens are, from left to right: a Lamy AL Star (I like this one because it’s a nice solid, metal pen with a button), a Steadtler Digital Mars, which I really like because it looks and feels like a pencil with a felt nib, a black, unbranded stylus I got from Aliexpress for $15, which works quite well, two (blue and red) S-Pen type styluses that, I think, were intended for use with Samsung cell phones (they’re tiny, cheap–$5–but work well, have a button, and a little clicky thing that’s nice for fidgeting with), and finally a clunky black pen that I got for $10 on Aliexpress that has, for me, a horrible tactile feel, and clunky nib, but a button and a working eraser, though the eraser mode is not terribly useful on the Supernotes.

More to follow as we get more experience with the e-ink devices.

Craft Fair

Our table at the craft fair. Makerspace Business’ coasters and small binders are in the foreground. 3d prints in the middle, and Chicken Middle’s earrings and other items on the far end. There is a student sitting at our second, small table that we set up for people (kids) to paint items they bought.

This Saturday, the middle school business (Chicken Middle) and the high-school Makerspace Business Club set up a table at the craft fair run by one of the local high schools (Lafayette HS). This was our first time trying this (though we’d done a test sale a couple weeks before at our school’s Harvest Hoedown) and I think it worked out pretty well.

Items in one of the orders. Most of this order was of coasters and 3d prints from the Makerspace Business, with one pair of earrings from Chicken Middle.

The Stuff we Brought for Sale (and what did sell)

Most of the what the Makerspace Business brought to the fair were things that students had been working on recently.

  • 3d prints: One of our high schoolers has taken over our 3d printers over the course of the last year and decided in the last two weeks before the fair to test to see just how much he could fit on our printers’ beds. Turns out a fair amount. So he used up a couple rolls of irridescent fillament a parent had donated to us to crank out a bunch of fidget toys, tops, earrings, and little boats (the calibration benchys)
An order consisting of mainly 3d printed items, including (clockwise from the top) a star fidget, glow-in-the-dark ghost earings, an irridescent top, and a glow-in-the-dark ghost. There’s also a wooden coaster.
  • Makerspace Business brought a lot of epoxy resin coasters for sale. Mainly this was because we recently purchased a pressure pot to help eliminate the bubbles when curing epoxy, and we’ve been testing it by making coasters. We even made a rack to stack items so we could put multiple layers into the pressure pot at once. We had quite a variety of styles and colors of coasters, but our math and science ones sold out the fastest.
A coaster order, that included one of our laser-cut coaster holders. This order grabbed most of our more sciencey and mathy coasters. Clockwise from the top are a Fibonacci spiral, a triangle showing the circumcenter, a sinusoidal wave parameters, a caffeine molecule, a serotonin molecule, and a wooden periodic table.
  • Small, laser-cut binders were on display, but I believe we only sold one. Most of the ones we had had laser cut designs on their fronts, but we’ve also been experimenting with dye-sublimation.
This order cosisted of a small binder (left), a ghost, an epoxy cat, epoxy earrings and a fidget toy. The cat and earrings were created by Chicken Middle.
  • Earrings: Both the middle schoolers and the Makerspace Business Club made earrings. Chicken middle specialized in neat little epoxy earrings using the collection of silicone molds we’ve collected in the makerspace over the year. These include a lot of irregular shapes, but also things like butterfly wings. They’ve been selling them too, not just at this craft fair, and it has been neat to see kids and parents walking around wearing them.
A customer (Sra. Mingo) proudly displays her newly purchased earrings.
  • We also set up a small table on the side where customers could customize what they bought. There was a box of wooden, laser-cut designs people could purchase and paint, and acrylic paint and paint pens to do the designs. We only had a few kids do this, but I thought this has a lot of potential, especially because we had a number of our middle school kids at the table to supervise.
A small customer at our DIY table. We need to bring boxes or chairs next time so smaller kids have easier access to the table top.

Costs and Revenue

The Makerspace Business paid for the table ($100), but the middle schoolers got half of the table space because they committed to manning the booth from 9 to 4 on a Saturday. Makerspace had enough sales to cover the cost of the table ($100), and make a little profit (we still have to run all the numbers), and Chicken Middle had some decent sales as well. Since this was our first time doing a fair, both groups invested significantly in creating items for sale. So, I expect the Makerspace Business has probably not yet broken even when factoring in all the other expenses. Neither group, however, come close to selling out what they had, so they still have a significant stock remaining for the next time.

Entrepreneurship Program

From a pedagogic perspective, the craft fair table was part of our entrepreneurship program, which starts of with the upper-elementary kids who run the school store, then leads into Chicken Middle, which is required of the middle schoolers, and is rounded off with the Makerspace Business Club as an elective for high school students.

I consider this aspect of our effort to have been the most successful. We had about eight middle and two high school students at the table at some point during the day. They took informal shifts, though some of them were there for the entire day. All of our middle schoolers participated in some way at getting ready for the fair. They got a great experience figuring out the logistics as they prepared for the sale, and then learning how to run the table. Mr. Kickham, who is the faculty advisor for the middle school business this year, was a really excellent role model of how to talk to customers and how to pique their interest by giving the story that ours was a student-run-business.

Finally, the students did a good job at keeping track of what was sold, so we’ll be able to spend some time in math class this week graphing and doing data analysis. They also took written notes on customer requests, such as more birds, and musical notes in the sale items that should help inform our future preparations. I am quite looking forward to our debrief.

Conclusion

This is definitely something we should do again. In fact, since a business program should be something the kids do repeatedly, so they have time for analysis, reflection, and improvement, it would be nice to do something like this each quarter, or even more often, at a farmer’s market perhaps, during the warmer months.