Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
I’ve created a new Makerspace Blog for my students to post their projects. Sharing what you’ve learned and done is an important part of our learning. We always have a sharing session at the end of interims that we invite the rest of the school to take a look at what the makerspace students have accomplished.
Ms. Fu’s chemistry class were given a project to make 3d periodic tables based on the properties of the elements. A few groups went with Makerspace options, using the new vinyl cutter and laser.
The part that took the longest was marking all the columns for cutting. A worthwhile assignment would be to write a program to automatically make the cut-marks in an svg file that can be etched with the laser.
Pi Zero‘s are even cheaper versions of the Raspberry Pi. The price you pay is that they’re harder to connect to since all the ports are small (micro-USB’s and mini-HDMI’s), so you need adapters to connect to keyboards, mice, and monitors. However, if you have the wireless version (Pi Zero W) you can set it up to automatically connect to the WiFi network, and work on it through there using the command line. This is a brief summary of how to do this (it’s called a “headless” setup) based on Taron Foxworth’s instructions. It should work for the full Raspberry Pi as well.
You can install the Raspbian Stretch (or Raspbian Lite which does not include the desktop GUI that you will not use) on a SD card (I used 8 or 16 Gb cards).
You may have to remove and reinsert the SD Card to get it to show up on the file system, but once you have you can set it up to automatically connect to WiFi by:
/boot partition (it usually shows up as the base of the SD Card on your file manager) and create a file named “ssh”.
country=US
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
ssid="myWifi"
scan_ssid=1
psk="myPassword"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
Now put the SD Card into the Pi and plug in the power.
First you have to find the Pi on the local network. On Windows I use Cygwin to get something that looks and acts a bit like a unix terminal (on Mac you can use Terminal, or any shell window on Linux).
To find the ip address of your local network use:
on Windows:
> ipconfig
look for the “IPv4 Address”.
Mac (and Linux?)
> ifconfig
look under “en1:”
To connect you use ssh on the command line (Mac or Linux) or something like Putty
Without a static IP address it is possible that the Pi’s IP address will change occasionally. I followed the instructions on Circuit Basics and MODMYPI, but basically you have to:
> route -ne
> cat /etc/resolv.conf
interface wlan0 static ip_address=10.0.0.99 static routers=10.0.0.1 static domain_name_servers=75.75.75.75
Adding a webserver (apache with php) is pretty easy as well, just run the commands (from the Raspberry Pi Foundation)
Apache web server:
sudo apt-get install apache2 -y
PHP for server-side scripting
sudo apt-get install php libapache2-mod-php -y
Now your can find the webpage by going to the ip address (e.g. http://10.0.0.1).
The actual file that you’re seeing is located on the Pi at:
/var/www/html/index.html
You will probably need to change the ownership of the file in order to edit it by running:
> sudo chown pi: index.html
Our seniors wanted to leave a mark, so after their initial application to paint the outside wall of the gym was turned down, they went with a mural on the inside–in our Makerspace.
For this project, we wanted to create a mural on the basementnasium wall. First, we measured the wall and went to Home Depot to get enough paint, paint brushes, drop cloths, and tape. Then, after cleaning the wall with a damp cloth, we covered the wall with tape in a triangular pattern similar to one we found online. After that, we used pencil to mark each triangle with a letter corresponding to one of the six colors that we bought. It took us the majority of the project to paint 3-4 coats on each triangle, and on the last day we pulled it the tape and touched up any mistakes with white paint.
Throughout this project, we found out that some people know how to paint, some people learned, and others didn’t learn. BUT IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!
-Team: Elliott, Abby, John, Zoe, Mary, Annemarie, and Josiah
-Abby R.
For my makerspace project I made a longboard. What went well with the board was the wheels and trucks, it was a simple hole in the wood and screwing the trucks almost no measuring on my part. What didn’t go so well was the measuring and cutting of the board, it took me a full day to get all the measurements exact and even then they didn’t come out so good. What I would do next time is get a cnc machine so it does the measuring and gets the cuts exact every time. We could mass produce longboards with ease. If i did it again without a cnc machine i would get the measurements beforehand and then it would make measuring a lot easier.
– Isaac L.
After building our vegetable boxes, I had one of the students use some of the wood scraps to make some small stools. They make it easier for us to sit cross-legged on the floor. This last interim, as a small side project, another student chose to upholster them:
During the interim, I worked on upholstering small wooden stools that Dr. Urbano had made. I worked in the basmentnasium and only used the materials available there. I used thin layers of foam from an old couch to pad the wooden seat; if the foam was too thin then I used two layers. I covered the foam and the seats’ edges with fabric Dr. Urbano brought: a burlap rice bag and old curtains. I attached the fabric to the bottom of the wooden seat with a staple gun; I attached it tight enough to keep the foam in place.
– Mary R.
Two years ago we bought a greenhouse. It was aluminum framed with plastic panels. Unfortunately, its profile was not as wind-resistant as it needed to be for our campus. So last semester we built three vegetable boxes and salvaged the plastic panels from the greenhouse to build low-profile cold frames. These turned out quite nicely, and the Middle School’s Student-Run-Business’ Gardening Department have been experimenting with different types of produce.
The wood for the raised beds and the frames for the cold frames were purchased using funds from a grant by the Whole Kids Foundation and the pieces cut at the TechShop.
One of the more interesting projects of the last year was the wooden Quarto set I made for our middle schoolers to use during their study hall.
The game is quite an interesting one, as was the build. The pieces (rectangular and cylindrical prisms capped with solid or hollow tops) were fairly simple to make using the table-saw for the bodies and laser cutter for the tops. However, I wanted to make a box for the pieces and have the board with its 4×4 grid of circle serve as the top.
Cutting out the top and bottom of the box out of plywood (on the CNC machine) was easy enough, as was lasering on the grid, but the most fascinating part was making the sides of the box. The rounded corners on the top required rounded sides, so I used the laser to cut a living hinge on a piece of plywood and glued it to the base. Then I used some spacer pieces for the inside to hold up an inset that would hold the pieces.
