This project was really frustrating at first because i just couldnt grasp the programming. Once I finally did though, translating it to artwork was actually easier for me because we’ve already been working on paper circuits. My “Ah-ha” moment was when I realized the legs on the ATtiny had to be one side negative and the other positive, a simple circuit. Once side of all the copper tapes had to be positive and the other negative. Then you had to remember which numbers you used (0, 1, 2…). First thing i did on my art work was attached the battery and make a holder for it. Then i knew which copper tape was positive and which was negative. I basically built off of that. The diagram really helped me. All of the positive legs of my LEDS had to be attached to the positive tape, even if more tape is added to the original positive strip. Same with the negative. One issue is that the numbered legs of ATiny and copper tape extensions,  have to go over the original positive or negative tape. This is a bridge. I covered the original positive tape with masking tape, or paper for a bridge for leg tapes to go over. I also added a switch by making a gap in the positive tape and paper. The artwork i chose to use was a print of my pivotal moments project last semester which is a collage representing some of my mentors. My stepmom is the yellow person to the left holding an Egyptian obelisk, where an LED lights up. This represents her as an artist who is holding onto traditional art making, or “old masters” type of work. The yellow person in the middle represents my professor from SVA who showed me the ways of making more meaningful conceptual work about my own life, and LED lights up at the point of where he’s holding a molecule. I’m represented on the right with a stick, pointing to my discoveries where a third LED lights up.

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Maker Day was super successful for our squishy circuits. Thankfully we did a ton of planning and made all of our dough days before. Making the dough for our squishy circuits was a little more difficult than i thought it would be. It took a lot of time to make each batch, cooking it on the stove. We made test sculptures and they worked! On actual Maker Day it started out a little slow but then we got a rush of kids! I was pleasantly surprised how eager they were to try out the squishy circuits. For some of the younger children we told them to explore the play dough and make whatever they wished first, then we would help them make their sculptures light up! And then we explained to them that they needed insulator dough in order for the circuit to work correctly. Once the battery was attached to the dough it helped to tell the students to to add their LED legs to specific colors instead of saying negative or positive. It was nice to have so many different ages and cognitive levels. There wasn’t one age that didn’t understand and that was really surprising to me. Circuits are actually a simple concept. All of the kids enjoyed this project and the parents thought it was super cool.

For this project we used a program called Tinkercad which took a little while to get used to the interface. It’s kind of strange to design using purely shapes and to cut a shape you have to use like a square to cut a strait line. It’s fairly easy to make holes in a design once you understand the concept of how it works. I chose to make a crystal container. I mine Quartz crystals from the Shawangunk Mountains near Wurtsboro and Ellenville New York. I really wanted to design a container that would be useful to me while collecting them. I designed the container to be a large crystal shape. I made a bottom and a lid as separate shapes for easier 3d printing. I had some trouble when it finally printed and my container had shifted in size because i did not use the SHIFT KEY when making it larger. Using the shit key maintains its correct proportions when transforming. I Used a translucent blue color for the filament which is really nice aesthetically for this project. For an added element: I included the Longitude and Latitude numbers on the container of the location where i mine them!

I had a lot of fun making this lesson but it was a lot of work. I thought of the idea when I started thinking about costume changes and background, it’s fairly simple to create quick change in the Scratch program so I thought why not try claymation? The Big Idea for this lesson is Metamorphosis, but just realistic metamorphosis as in the transformation of a butterfly. It can be thought of as metamorphosis of anything, changes from one object to another or one personality to another. This lesson brings together students clay objects, which are documented frequently for different costumes. I edited them in Photoshop first but I think I could have just used the magic eraser in Scratch to delete the photo background.  The whole movies is made up of one thread of costume changes, movements and background changes. I added the music of Philip Glass to make it more dramatic.

Link to Scratch Movie:  https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/207073434/

Here are some screen shots of the movie:

This game was really fun to make because I used my actual dog as inspiration. I made the images in Photoshop and played around with a background thats sort of like a coloring book. There are 3 different backgrounds and they changes slightly with added features and colors when you click on the flag. Each time a new background is picked the numbers on the hungry and happy data change back to 5 and 0. To make Banjo less hungry you feed him the dog food bowl. To make Banjo happy you click on the ball. The ball changes color (costume changes) when it’s clicked. The bone changes size and makes a chomp sound when clicked. This game is super simple and could have been a little more complex but as simple as it is it was fun!

Link to Scratch Game: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/205576510/

This project was so much fun! after leaning the skills needed to really make anything you want, it was great to see everyone take such freedom with ideas for their cards. I didn’t want to go with a typical greeting card so i decided to make a constellation horoscope card. I drew out the constellation and poked holes where the LEDS would go. i pushed them through and added elmers glue to make sure they’d stay put once bending the wires where i needed. Once i added the copper tape for one side +, another _ , I was scared everything was super tight and too close together to get it to work properly. But soldering really secured everything and it worked great! I had some trouble with the lights not always lighting up and the green seems to over power the blue so i added an extra battery and then a battery pack to keep everything in place. I included the blinking light circuit design and it worked well with my finger labyrinth. I really like how the whole thing came out aesthetically and conceptually. This project would work well for high schoolers and be good to be done in steps throughout one week.

Beginning

Concept

Final Video

This project was really fun, there was a lot of room for creativity and coming up with ideas to make a collage/image move in some way. Brionna and I found an image we liked right away and decided to run with it. It was an image of a faint rainbow in the background of a landscape. We wanted the rainbow to be more apparent and move so Brionna worked on the logistics of making the movement work. She added a double circuit and pushed the motor through the cardboard. I worked on the rainbow aspect and decided to use a small container to add to the motor and decorate it with rainbow everything!  I added pipe cleaners and paper and paint. We had a little trouble once we attached it with it being too heavy. So we made a spacer between the motor and the container and it worked much better! Once we got those two components down, we wanted to incorporate LEDs so we made a flower/sun led by just attaching LEDs around a battery as they are. I would def use this project in my classroom as it was fun and not super competitive but a good way to explore materials.

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Emily and I got our machine to work fairly quickly which gave us a lot more time to work on our design aesthetic and our word-card component.  We first started building our Machine and getting it to successfully work with the binder clip switch. The original offset we used for our motor was a small wooden dowel. this worked really well but we felt we could get it to move faster. We decided to add a hotglue stick instead. This made our machine move really fast and spin in circles. We experimented with changing the position of the glue stick and it would offset our machine so much that it kept falling over. So we put the gluestick back in the middle of the motor.

Once we got our machine to move the way we wanted, we started to work on other design and aesthetic elements. Our word was “Resistance” so we decided on a few options to incorporate that. One option was a bent popsicle stick that restricted the movement of the glue stick and slowed the whole machine down. We felt this was a little boring to watch so we decided on another option. We added a cardboard border which kept our creature in a restrictive area and was unable to move past it. Our creature was like a bird since we added feathers and a beak, so the idea became “bird in a cage”. It was really funny to watch when it moves around and its beak would move in a quacking motion. The feathers added even more resistance as when they would rub up against the cardboard the bird would pivot and change it’s course.

This project was way more fun for me than the marble run was. I think that’s because a.) it was successful, and worked in a short amount of time. And b). because the materials available worked really well for this project. I felt like making tube-like tunnels out of thick cardboard in the marble run was super frustrating.

Beginning materials

Final Design

“Resistance” options and original offset

Video of Machine