Pluggin' away...

The first week of school has come and gone, and things are going pretty well.  Aside from having NO internet access and being unable to put grades / attendance in with any regularity, the year didn't start out as rough as I thought it was going to.

Couple of rambling thoughts I've had bouncing around in my head as I introduced a new batch of students to the IGSBEP (design process... see last post) and had parents in for a back to school night:

Failing to succeed, OR- Failing, TO succeed.   There is a billboard here in town that has random quotes on it.  One of the more recent ones was "The road to success is paved with failures" or something along those lines.  Seems like students get conditioned to doing things one way, and if it doesn't work out just the way it's supposed to they get frustrated and give up.  I know I was that way in school, particularly when it came to math.  If I did it the way I was shown and it didn't work- so what.  Move on to the next problem and hope the teacher explains it again tomorrow!  I hope in my classes to get the kids to be able to realize that there is more than one way to skin a cat (wow, both my cats just got up and left the room...).  The way I show them how to do something is the way that works for me, but it might not necessarily be the way that works the best for them.

The most important part of that lesson- and this took me a long time to figure out- is that you WILL fail.  You'll get a wrong answer, things won't come out quite the way you had planned.  And thats okay!  Adapt, be flexible, try it again from a different angle.  Thomas Edison came up with something like 3,000 different ways to (re)invent the light bulb- I think only two of them worked well enough for him to use them.  I don't know that I'm that patient.  No, I *know* I'm not that patient.

Anyways, enough random thoughts.  So many things going on right now.  I feel a mass-unloading of projects / junk in the near future.  On the other hand, I have been managing to get a lot done.  Even managed to fire up the TIG welder and get a little practice in on aluminum.  Still have a long ways to go.



Had a nice faculty meeting, in which I stayed awake, paid very close attention, and came up with the nifty sketch too!  It was pretty interesting, we got to have a short little lesson taught to us in Romanian to give us an idea of what ELL students go through.  Kind of an eye opener.  Also got a few items checked off on Dan's chariot, more coming on that in a few days.

"VACANT" experiments.

My principle asked me if I could come up with some sort of system to let people know if one of our handicapped bathrooms was occupied.  I kicked around a few ideas and came up with this.  



Been awhile since I've used the printer so I fired it up...



Dang, the MM 2.0 is just tooooo fast. Let me slow that down a bit.








These were supposed to be test prints checking for size, but I decided they were plenty good enough, even running at 121% of maximum speed!


Here's the rest of the sign for the bathroom... Left goes on the outside, right on the inside.



Bar will go through a hole in the door, then the covers go over the dials and are screwed to the door. That way, you can tell from inside the bathroom what it says outside.



Inside:



Outside.



Little rough for a print, but again, I was running pretty darn fast.

Cleaned them up a bit with an acetone fuming,









Slapped some paint on the disks,



and gathered up all the parts.



Tried gluing in a clear piece of plastic to prevent kids from sticking a pencil in there and turning it from the outside... We'll see how long that lasts.



Drill a hole in a perfectly good door,



Put the bar in the front disk and slide it through,



and screw the cover on over top.



On the back:



Put the knob on,



and screw it's cover on.



There you go!





Guess we'll see if it works or not.  Thats the best part about the printer-  I can make changes and run off a new copy in just a few minutes.  Glad that I've been able to use the printer around the school for more than just student projects!

Airing out the Z50's...

Man, I have got to do this more often.  The boys have been driving me batty asking if they could do this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or that.  Time to get them OUT OF THE HOUSE.  They finally asked, very half-heartedly because they knew the answer was going to be no-  "Can we get the dirt bikes out?".  SURE! 

Trusty old Honda's fired right up and away they went.  I could tell they were going to get bored with the standard loop down the road so I let them add a 'round the house loop.


Didn't take long until they were bending the last corner pretty hard so they could hit the "jump".







Yeee-HAW!







Oooopss... Little TOO fast on that corner with the wet grass.



Who knew? The front fender of a Z50 can be used as a plow in a pinch.



He got back on his horse though.





Might have to load 'em up and head to the Rose pond again. That was a lot of fun too!

Leftover Printer Projects.

So I found a few pictures from my tech 2 class from last school year.  Thought I posted them already but apparently not, so here they are.

I gave them a pretty simple set of directions:  Design something in Sketchup with at least 3 different parts, one of which must "move".  I had several kids try and do cases for phones and ipods, but they proved a little to detail rich for most of them.  Here are a couple that I managed to take pics of before they left for the year.

Airplane.  Printed in several different pieces then assembled with glue.  The propeller spins!





Ipod charging stand.  No moving parts, but very functional!



 

Lego guy and a robot.The one on the right has moving arms.



Turntable.  Tried printing rollers for it but ended up using ball bearings.



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And a couple of pics while on the printer.


 


 

There were several others, but I didn't get a chance to take pictures of them.  Had a couple of R/C winches and a really cool bicycle with spinning wheels and a working set of handlebars.  I'd like to reprint that one for my classroom sometime.

Just for fun, a few from today.  Making an "Occupied" sign for the handicapped bathrooms at school.  Cranked up the speed, man is that thing fast!




 
 

There you go.  I'm sure we'll have plenty of projects to post in the coming months!