Tools, Making and Learning

Students brought in a number of tools made out of wood from last weeks homework assignment. There were some clever surprises, some that solved day to day problems, such as boiling the perfect egg to solutions in search of problems, such as wooden screwdrivers and tension sensitive hex keys. Most valuably, students learned and shared a number of lessons. For some experienced in large woodworking, it was humbling to go down to smaller sizes, and others got a better grasp of the value of sandpaper and time.

After showing the tools they made, Jose introduced the students to some new ones, mainly Google Sketch-Up and DraftSight. Jose went over basic elements of Sketch-Up such as drawing, extruding, cutting and placing text. After Jose noted how difficult it was to make a sphere in Sketch-Up, I noted at least 3 students who googled "how to make a sphere in sketch-up" and one student who seemed to successfully do so. Jose did show them some more complex features, specifically installing plugins and using one of them to slice up models to export them for laser cutting in slices. This lead into their homework assignment, which is to model a food utensil that can allow grasping and cutting for a disabled child. These will then get printed in a later class. I look forward to what they come up with after the some of the interesting woodworking projects.