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.

Back to FabMaker Studio Home Page

Getting Started

FabMaker Quick Start

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.

Building pop-up made from a series of box pop-ups.
Flower pop-up uses inverted triangles, a trapezoid, and a rectangle for the stem.
Students use hand-drawn butterflies to create a butterfly pop-up.
Bird pop-up uses simple line object drawn in FabMaker Studio.

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.

Blog post – Flurry of Creativity Supports STEAM Learning