Basic Circuitry

For this module's creative project, I chose to collage a little rat sitting on a laptop. The rat is trying to start an assignment, but needs help coming up with an idea. To help the rat have a mental breakthrough, rather than a mental breakdown, pull its tail to give it an idea! I'm feeling very stressed about my impending finals and course registration, so I created this as a humorous expression of the tension I, and probably everyone else at TC, are experiencing this time of year. 

To create my little circuit collage, I followed 4 steps:

1) Roughly sketch out your idea(s):

2) Pick an idea, then cut out your collage pieces and glue them down where you want. For complicated shapes, draw the reverse image of your shapes on the paper, cut them out, and then flip them over so you don't see the pencil marks. I tried to do this for the laptop keyboard in my college, but ultimately went the simpler route and overlapped thin strips of paper to form a grid. Some complicated shapes may require an X-acto knife and a cutting mat, but I couldn't find mine, so I relied on my scissors, one of the knife attachments on my linocutter, and a cutting board. I also would recommend a glue stick for this type of project, but I only had Elmer's clear glue lying around. 

3) Map out your circuit on the back of your collage and tape it down. I used one yellow LED light, copper tape, and a 3V coin battery. I knew I wanted the rat's tail to act as a switch, so I watched this YouTube video on how to make a pulltab slider switch for a paper circuit. I copied the circuit layout from the video but adjusted it to fit where I wanted my tail slider and LED to be. Then I cut a slit at the base of the rat for its tail to slide through later. In this first image, you can see my circuit when it's in its off position. The positive side of the battery is facing up, and the negative prong of the LED is pointing towards the battery. I taped a tab larger than the slit I cut earlier to the top of the tail and added copper tape to it. When you pull the tail down, the copper tape on the tab overlaps with the rest of the circuit. You can see this in the second image. 

4) Troubleshooting. As you can see in the second image above, my circuit worked, but unfortunately, the tail switch had to be held down to make contact. Additionally, the battery is only held to the paper with copper tape, which won't hold well if I need to lift or move my collage. To solve these issues, I cut strips of paper and taped them over and around the tail switch and battery to apply pressure and prevent tearing. Adding paper around the tail switch also stops it from being pushed too far up or down. In the image below, you can see the circuit in its off position with the paper strips taped in place. 

Overall, this was a pretty fun and simple project. I didn't run into too many issues creating my circuit. I think getting to experiment with circuits in class, along with the fact that I did my Digital Stewardship presentation on circuitry, and used to build circuits for fun as a kid, helped me out. I actually got more frustrated with the collage portion of my project because I couldn't find all the materials I had intended to use, and I had to simplify the keyboard for time's sake.

I haven't taken Artistic Development of Children yet, but if I were to do this project with 4th graders, I would probably give them a clearer theme. I would also show them lots of examples, because I think the hardest part about this was coming up with a creative switch that isn't just functional. Seeing lots of examples of different creative switches might help them to come up with their own. I also like the idea of the first part of class focusing on exploring circuits as a material and experimenting before students create their final collages. We would also need to go over safety and rules at the very start! 

3D Fabrication

For this assignment, Jádé and I decided to collaborate again! Our ideas for the assignment went through many iterations before we arrived at what you see above. Originally, Jádé had the cool idea to film a stop-motion using glasses that we designed and 3D-printed. The glasses would be "magical" and transform the wearer's environment into a new world. We were originally thinking on a larger scale, but once we learned that 3D printing can take a long time, we realized the glasses needed to be really small. But not to worry! Because, what else is small...? Rats, of course! Our "magical" glasses would be rat-sized and transport the whiskered wearer to a cozy rat home. Jádé had some cool ideas for the angles and transitions we could create in our stop-motion, and I had already made a rat home for Judy Burton's Processes and Structures class that we could reuse! Alas, as we flailed around in Tinkercad, we realized our big idea might be a little too big for this week and decided to leave stop-motion making for the future. 

We started off by sketching our designs. We wanted the glasses to look like they could be made of materials a rat foraged for themselves. Trash, food scraps, sticks, vines, leaves, flowers, water droplets, and spiderwebs all came to mind, but we decided to stick with natural elements. We definitely encountered a learning curve in Tinkercad. We really struggled to create cutouts to get the shape of the glasses we wanted, and some of the details we originally planned for, like a spiderweb in the eye of one of the glasses, just didn't work with the program's grid system and our small scale. We were rushing a bit because we only had an hour to work in Tinkercad together after class, but ultimately ended up with something whimsical. 

The next day, we got together to 3D print our file with the help of CeCe, one of the studio fellows. We measured the face of my rat stuffed toy, Boris, and resized the glasses in Cura. Finally, we hit print! 

Watching our project print was really cool, and after about 20 minutes, our rat glasses were ready! After class, Jádé and I used pilers to pull off the supports and gathered painting materials. We went on a bit of a wild-goose chase because all the studios were closed for classes, but found a spot in the Dance Ed Program area to work. We had only a few random materials with us, so we had to use some unconventional methods to paint our glasses. Jádé made a stand for them using tape, a straw, and a cork. I had the idea to cover the glasses with a layer of black Sharpie before we painted them, and we found pipe cleaners to use as paintbrushes. Eventually, we went on a hunt around campus for more practical materials and bumped into someone willing to let us borrow some paint and paint brushes. We mixed different shades of brown and green for our vines and leaves, then dry-brushed them over the black Sharpie base to get our final product!

Overall, working on this project was a fun learning experience despite the stress of our time crunch. Introducing students to the possibilities of different technologies as creative media is important and something I hope to offer as a future teacher, but after our experience, I've learned there are a few practical considerations to keep in mind when it comes to 3D printing. Firstly, 3D printing can take a long time. If I were to have my students work on a 3D printing project, I would reduce this time by having them focus on small, thin, yet detailed designs. Working with a partner also saves time because only one design needs to be printed for two people. It's also less intimidating to work on a 3D design and fabrication project with a partner; if one person forgets how something works, their partner might remember, and any mistakes they make are made as a team rather than as an individual. 

I also wonder if some students might feel like making something small is insignificant. To avoid this feeling, it might be interesting if the assignment were to 3D print something to serve as part of a larger art piece or sculpture that students make together later using cardboard and found materials. One of the teachers I'm observing this semester is leading a sculpture unit in which his class is split into two teams to create large cardboard sculptures. Everyone on each team has a specific job title, like lead engineer or head designer. Similarly, students could come up with ideas for a sculpture as a class, then assign roles for who should design and 3D-print different elements. 

3D Design

Originally, for my 3D Design assignment, I asked Richard for permission to create a 3D floor plan of the classrooms I visited for field observations. This proved a little too difficult for me as a beginner in Tinkercad, and it felt intimidating and a bit overwhelming to learn another platform like SketchUp. So I ended up using Tinkercad to design a forsythia pendant for a necklace. 

Why Forsythia? Over Easter weekend, I was in the car with family when my aunt pointed out all the bright yellow bushes growing in the yards we passed by. She called the flowers forsythia. I was gobsmacked. "Forsythia!?" I thought, "No way." 

Image credit: PxHere

For years, I've enjoyed listening to a song titled "Forsythia" by the band Veruca Salt. I often listen to this song and others from the same album while sitting near my bedroom window. Outside that very window, four forsythia shrubs grow. Somehow, for at least nine years of my life, I've listened to "Forsythia" while sitting next to forsythia without realizing. Maybe the plants knew this whole time and have been sending messages to my subconscious so I'd play the song over and over. Actually, this is probably true because I am writing this right now near my bedroom window while listening to "Forsythia," and I designed my pendant earlier today from the same spot! As the lyrics go, "One thing about Forsythia, she comes around, and I get lost. Against her yellow, I'm no longer me." My eyes must be yellow now. 

It was to appease the plants and heal my forsythia fever that I decided to design a forsythia pendant for this assignment. At first, the process was a bit frustrating. The way Tinkercad has users move around the workspace using the cube in the top-left was irritating, but as I continued working, it became easier to navigate. To create my pendant, I grouped, cut, combined, copied, and pasted multiple shapes to get my finished result. Ideally, the hole for the necklace chain would be towards the bottom tip of the flower, but Tinkercad wouldn't let me put one there, despite how many things I tried. Overall, though, I am happy with my forsythia pendant as my first independent Tinkercad creation! I think the forsythia is happy, too, though they might make me 3D-print and paint it one day...

Reading Takeaways

Image credit: Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Regalla, L. (2016). Developing a maker mindset. In K. Peppler, E. R. Halverson, & Y. B. Kafai (Eds.), Makeology: Makerspaces as learning environments (Volume 1) (pp. 257–272, Chapter 17). Routledge
&
Blikstein, P. (2013). Digital fabrication and “making” in education: The democratization of invention. FabLabs: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors, 1–2.

These readings exemplify how the maker-mindset and Makerspaces/Digital Fabrication Labs offer a more natural approach to learning through play and exploration, and a different approach to teaching through facilitation of self-directed learning. While reading, I was reminded of a class I took during my first semester at TC, called A&H 5195: Experience, Education, and Histories, taught by Professor Thomas James. Our first assignment was to write about a foundational learning experience we had at or before age 7. What I wrote about is distinctly similar to the making processes described in both readings. Below is an excerpt from that assignment:

“Before the age of seven and after, one of my favorite things to do was play with my Polly Pockets. But I didn’t play with them the same way as my other dolls… My Polly Pockets were more like crash test dummies. As soon as I figured out how to tie knots (around four years old) and got my hands on string and tape, I was creating webs of polly pocket ziplines, hammocks, and falling nets. No wall or piece of furniture was safe from my stash of Scotch tape, and my parents often found it impossible to walk through our basement. Eventually, my materials spanned out to include Dixie cups, fabric, plastic, paper, paperclips, kites, rubber bands, helium balloons, water, electric circuitry kits, and my brother’s Hot Wheels tracks and Legos. Ziplines were only step one; I was making swings, trampolines, hot air balloons, parachutes, hang gliders, slides, and jigging my electric circuitry kits to extra batteries to try and get the fan attachment to fly in the air with a poor Polly Pocket taped to its top (I ended up playing doll hospital after some of these experiments).

Initially, a lot of my string, zipline, hammock type creations were to enrich the setting and plots of the stories I was making up, inspired by the animated Barbie movies of the early 2000s. I was obsessed with fairies as a kid and wanted to be one so badly. I would often dream of flying and felt disappointed every time I woke up and realized it was a dream. If I couldn’t fly, I was determined to get my Polly Pockets to. Eventually, my interests evolved into understanding how different objects and forces interact to create movement and how little changes could affect the outcome of one of my experiments. I enjoyed discovering how many paperclips to add to a paper parachute so it would float properly and figuring out how long it would take before different designs would fail at different heights by trying things over and over.

My self led learning was a stark difference to my formal learning experience...”

Like the learners described in the readings, the door to my experimentation was opened by my interests: fairies and Barbie movies. As I kept experimenting, I became more engaged in how things worked, solving problems, and combining materials. And, my seven-year-old self’s natural constructivist way of learning was very different from the type of learning encouraged at school, which led me to struggle. As teachers, how can we work within the systems in place to provide our students with the benefits of Makerspaces and maker mindsets? How should we structure our lessons to meet the requirements while still benefiting students? How do we become facilitators?

Citation:

Bashaw, G. (2024). Experience, Education, and Histories [Unpublished essay]. Department of Arts & Humanities, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Initial Ideas for my Final Project

Initial Ideas for my Final Project:

Last class, we each rolled the three dice to pick the focus for our final projects. I rolled science (lucky!!!!), found materials (ok, sure), and video & editing (oh no)... Why "oh no" for video & editing? Well, there are a few reasons. Filming and editing videos is not something I have much experience with. I also don't like recording my voice or being on camera. I like watching videos, but I don't like making or being in them. Additionally, since this is our last creative assignment, I want to like whatever I make. When it comes to video art, I prefer installations that include video rather than videos that are the artwork themselves. I'm not sure how I can accomplish that as a beginner with an approaching deadline and several other assignments. Making something physical and then filming it would be easier, but it feels like cheating, and just isn't as satisfying conceptually because it doesn't feel integrated or intentional enough. I'm unsure how to create something I'll end up liking for this project.

Jádé had a good idea and recommended that I create a stop motion to fulfill the video portion of the project. Building on that, my first idea is to use shiny found materials to create a stop-motion of a mineral's crystal structure, growing layer by layer. However, there are a few potential issues with this. Firstly, using a bunch of random objects to create a very specific structure may not be realistic. Sometimes materials don't stick together well with tape or glue, and for a structure meant to keep growing, it would be a problem if it collapsed before the stop motion was finished. I considered stacking the found materials between layers of clear acrylic, but because the materials are different shapes and sizes, the structure wouldn't hold. I can film a 2D version of the crystal structure, but it won't be as engaging. 

                                          The atomic arrangement in natrolite, a common          Natrolite crystals on basalt from the Puy de Dôme,

                                          zeolite. Image from Mineralogy by Dexter Perkins      France. Photo by Didier Descouens via 

                                          et al., OpenGeology.org.                                                      Wikimedia Commons.

My second idea is to make something about rock thin sections in a microscope. Those are pretty shiny and colorful, and I have some photos of them from my Petrology class. I could use shiny, transparent found materials for that, too, but I'm not sure where the video part will fit in. I can do what my group did in 2D Fabrication with a video of a color-changing light playing beneath the transparent material, and take a video of it, but that doesn't feel right either. Thin sections aren't layered; they're 2D because they are single slices of rock mounted on a thin glass plate. The light video part makes sense because microscopes shine light at the thin section from below, but this idea seems like a video of something I made rather than incorporating video into the concept, which I wanted to avoid. 

The more I think about it, the more I think thin sections would be great to recreate with scanography. For instance, scanner beds are made of a sheet of glass, objects get placed on top of the scanner bed, and the scanner emits light from below as it scans. Thin sections are flat pieces of rock or mineral mounted onto a glass slide, and when you place them under the microscope, it shines light at them from below. If I created a stop motion video using images of found objects scanned with a scanner, would that be considered a video? 

Peer Work Appreciation

For this assignment, I commented on the blogs of Joyce, Cheyenne, Mila, Chloe, Jádé, Shihan, and Kate. I try to look at my classmates' blogs every once in a while, because it's super cool to see how others have approached the same assignments, but I don't think I've commented on anyone's blog until now. It was nice to have that little push, and it's great practice for when I'll eventually have to comment on my future students' work. It was also super nice to see the comments my classmates left me on my own blog, not just the compliments, but also the constructive criticism! I actually hope we can do this again another week, though I don't know if that'll fit in with what Richard has planned. I often struggle with what to say about a piece when I'm looking at it, so this was a nice low-pressure way to practice. I'm still trying to find the balance between giving positive feedback and constructive feedback. It's not just that I'm afraid to give constructive feedback; my brain tends to focus on the artist's process and concept, and I'm less knowledgeable about the technical stuff across many media. I also lack some technical vocabulary, which can make it difficult to communicate what I see.

2D Fabrication

Results:

Process:

This project came out way cooler than I think Jádé, Chloe, and I expected! Our ideas came about in chunks throughout the process. During class last week, Jádé whispered to me that she really wanted to explore light with this project. Being someone who studied rocks for 4 years, I thought of optical calcite because it refracts light in interesting ways. We were talking about different structures we could make that would include optical calcite, but I didn’t have any with me to test whether it would produce an intense enough rainbow effect. So, we pivoted. Opal is another mineral that interacts with light to produce multiple colors, but in a brighter, more exciting way. Then I thought, what if we tried to recreate the look of an opal using stacked layers of clear acrylic?

At this point, Chloe joined our team, which was a big help! We started pulling materials and experimenting with layering transparent colored acrylic sheets as Jádé began working on our design mock-up on Procreate!



As we were working, we realized we might need to rethink our process and layer placements, so I grabbed a few sheets of colored paper for Chloe and me to create physical mock-ups. This part of the process was very back-and-forth, and we had to consider what would actually work and look nice while still being realistic about timing. Originally, we wanted to fill the cutout parts of each layer with a different color of acrylic, but ultimately decided that, to let light through, it would be best to leave the holes open and place an iridescent piece of acrylic on top for it to still be flat. Chloe made a really awesome deconstruction of the idea with the paper scraps, and Jádé updated the Procreate file to reflect our new ideas before exporting it to Adobe Illustrator.


Once in Adobe Illustrator, Jádé Image Traced our file, so our design could be cut and engraved. One thing we hadn’t thought about was making our file the same size as the project on the computer connected to Bubbles. We ended up having to resize our image and re-edit the strokes, which was complicated with multiple layers. Since we were using scraps, Chloe and I measured the largest open areas on each of our acrylic sheets to determine the size of our finished product. Jádé then resized each layer to reflect that, and we measured the coordinates of the open areas on each acrylic sheet so Jádé could move the layers to the right spot in the file. Finally, we were ready to hit print, but we ran into issues where Bubbles kept misreading our file. However, with much help from CeCe, the studio fellow, we were able to cut out each of our layers!

The next day, I was playing with our cut pieces before we met up again to glue them together. At some point earlier, I had mentioned the idea to shine a color-changing light through the bottom of our sculpture to give it the glowy quality of an opal. I pulled up a YouTube video of LED color-changing lights on my phone and experimented with stacking the different acrylic layers on top of it. Originally, we planned to have a white layer with cutouts second from the top, with a flat, iridescent, engraved layer on top. However, as I experimented, I realized I might like how it interacts with the light more without the white layer. I headed over to the studio, explained the situation to Adella, another studio fellow, and Jádé, and we experimented with the light and layers in the metal shop, where we could turn off the lights. Ultimately, we decided to leave the white layer as a removable piece at the very top, so we can choose to block some of the light or let it through.

Adella showed us how to use the acrylic glue, and we finally melded our pieces together after a few tests. The glue made a few blobby marks underneath our top iridescent layer, which we hadn’t expected. We actually liked the look of these glue blobs, but wish we had spread them out more to look more intentional. The good thing is that the white layer covers them, and when the light shines through the bottom, you hardly notice the marks.



With all of that done, we cut a quick mask out of black paper for Jádé’s iPad so light would not pass through the edges of our sculpture, and then went back into the metal shop to take photos, videos, and time-lapses!