February Challenges

February is here! Mardi Gras time!  In the spirit of Mardi Gras, one of the challenges for the month of February is to 3D print a Mardi Gras mask that is contoured to one's face.  This may seem like a simple challenge, but figuring out how to contour shapes on Tinkercad has been a little more challenging for my students than I originally thought it would be. Some of my students are using AutoDesk Fusion 360 to make their masks.

Here is a picture of some of the first submissions:

We also have a coding challenge going on this month, where students need to program a simple switch on/off coffee pot using a Raspberry Pi or Arduino board and set a timer/make it turn off and on using a program and not just the switch.  As of now, there has not been as much interest in this challenge as I would like, so I am thinking of incentives for the students to get them out of their comfort zone and try something new!

Starting the Spring Semester

We've started the spring semester here at the Oakridge School and things are already moving quickly. January seems to have flown by as we are already in February!

In January, the students and teachers came back from a nice 2 week break.  It took a couple of days for us all to get back into the swing of things, but once we did, we flew!

We hosted a Maker Faire on Saturday January 23rd and had a great turn out!  Many younger prospective students were very interested in what we are doing in our Makerspace. The big attraction for the young ones was the 3D printer. We also had Makey Makey demonstrations, robotics demonstrations, and some engineering demonstrations.  It was a great time for us to showcase to the community what we are doing in the Oakridge Upper School Makerspace.

In the athletics, we hosted the 8th annual Oakridge Iron Championships powerlifting meet where my kids competed well and many took home medals!

In my tech class, I had students write project proposals, what they plan on working on all semester and showing a finishes product in May.  Students submitted proposals for anything from a building an exoskeleton to building a 3D printed model car that runs on an Arduino motor!  I have some students building websites and others building 3D printed card holder boxes that will have movable parts to bring the cards up as you open the box.  It continually amazes me the different ideas students will come up with.

In addition, we have our challenges back and going for February with 2 month long challenges. The first is coding/programming a simple switch activated coffee pot to be programmable using either a Raspberry Pi or Arduino. The second is to 3D print a Mardi Gras mask that is contoured to fit a person's face, not just a flat mask. I even got in some gold filament for the Mardi Gras prints!

So far, I have 1 submission for the Mardi Gras mask challenge, and here is a picture of it printing (which is why the focus is off, the printer is going):

Lots of great things going on at Oakridge right now, it is a great time to be an Owl!