We were invited to St Michaels Primary by Janine Beckers the Art coordinator St Michaels Primary. She wrote to ask if we could suggest ways to make lessons more fun and exciting. We offered to run our Creature in a Cup workshop but we only had a 2 hour slot with the class so this was a new challenge to the ArtLab team. We kept the workshop idea but removed the story development about the creature for the performance. We hope the creatures might inspire some further story development. We shortened the time the pupils had to experiment with the electronics kits and build their creatures, but this didn’t stop the class making some fantastic kinetic creatures.
ArtLab team introduce the workshop
Class experiment with LittleBits
Class teacher Rachel Sims documents groups creature.
The pupils managed to get a lot done in the two hours as you can see from the following images and videos.
Here are the five groups creatures with soundtrack created with Littlebits Synthkits.
The pupils worked together in groups to design a creature from three different animals, below are some of their drawings.
The following images show the creatures in development.
Ben with group
Anna with group
Amal with group
Sahar with group
Matthew with group
Saturday, 20 February 2016
Enhancement Week
ArtLab Session 17/2/2016
In this session Nic and Kate led an introduction to LittleBits as well as 3D scanning and printing. All that attended learnt about these emerging and increasingly domesticated products through experimentation and play. The 3D scanner and printer are of particular interest to me as they present new sculpting possibilities. After some previous experimentation with the printing and scanning process I made a small sculpture to scan with the aid of a specially brought turntable. The turntable rotates the object being scanned very slowly while the scanner is statically mounted around 30-50cm away from the object. Once scanned the digital 3D scan is loaded into the computer to create a digital model which can then be edited in a basic way to make sure it is a sound model to be printed by the 3D printer. Before finalising the design the correct plastic material must be chosen in accordance with the colour(s) being used to print the model. In this case we had chosen gold which is an ABS based plastic. Cartridge change is also very simple and easy: cleaner and less fiddly than an inkjet printer. Loading the digital model onto the printer is very simple and done using a memory stick with some basic instructions to follow on the printer menu screen. Once the model is loaded and the print bed adequately primed with special water soluble glue, all that can be done now is to press PRINT! And here is the result. After 9 hours of printing we ended up with a miniature of my sculpture. Unfortunately a lot of the textures I had included (hessian/paper towel/cling-film/corrugated cardboard) did not pick up on the scan which has resulted in a very smooth, curvy print. Although considering this is the first scan and print that I have done from start to finish (obviously with a little help from Nic, Kate and the other students) it has gone reasonably well and the print itself is fairly flawless. What needs to be worked on is the scanning process itself and perhaps a more angular, decisive object to sculpt.
I did also have a quick go at using the laser cutter with ply wood. The digital design interface on the computer is basic but could be effectively utilised.
