FabMaker Studio Projects
Students PreK-8 use FabMaker Studio to design and create 2D stuff, pop-ups, 3D projects, working machines including the Make To Learn projects. Here are some examples from simple to sophisticated.
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Getting Started
Step by Step Directions for Getting Started
Animation Machine
The Animation Machine Make To Learn project helps students explore and understand the history of animation and cinema as they design, fabricate and construct a model of a simple animation machine developed in the nineteenth century. The Animation Machine file can be found in FabMaker Studio’s Ready Mades.
Download FabMaker Studio Animation Machine File: [ADD TO DROPBOX]
Assembling your Animation Machine
Speaker
The Speaker project lets students use basic materials like card stock, a battery, and wire to create a working speaker. Students hear the sound, see the vibrations, and can touch the cone to feel the vibrations. This activity helps students from primary through middle school understand how sound is created. Students can move from the simple speaker to testing sound and creating high fidelity speakers. The speaker file is found in FabMaker Studio’s Ready Mades.
Make To Learn main Speaker Project
Linear Motor
The Linear Motor project uses the same…
Linear Motor Step by Step Directions
Pop-Ups
Pop-ups provide a manipulative and compelling way for students to explore math concepts including angles and triangles, parallel lines and parallelograms, and symmetry, as well as the engineering design process including the rules and constraints that control these geometric constructions. Pop-ups provide multiple opportunities for cross-curricular tie-ins with language, science, and social studies.
Blog Post: Problem Solving With Fab@School Maker Studio: The Heart of Pop-ups
Lantern
This lighted lantern project provides an easy and motivating introduction to 3D design. Kids create a lantern from paper or cardstock and light it with either an LED votive or simple circuitry. They can start with a template, but deeper learning occurs when children modify the design or, better yet, start from scratch.
Lighted Lantern Activity Directions
Platonic Solids
Platonic Solids are made from congruent regular polygons with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. There are only five possible Platonic Solids of varying complexity. The simplest Platonic Solid is the triangular pyramid, which is constructed from four identical regular triangles. There is also the six-sided cube, eight-sided octahedron, 12-sided dodecahedron, and 20-sided icosahedron.
Classroom Activity: Visualize and Create 3D Geometry
Communities and Habitats
Students use FabMaker Studio to design and fabricate buildings, bridges, trains, planes and automobiles, spacecraft, space stations, animals and fanciful creatures and monsters — wherever their imagination and creativity lead them. Projects like these support not only science, technology, engineering and math, but also language, social studies and art. At the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Palm Beach County, Florida, students ages 5-12 designed communities and habitats incorporating all these elements.