My Class
That’s me doing the weird squinty thing
hamish , looking at something interesting, Becket, looking at the camera with a determined mission impossible face, Antonio (not pictured), Ollie (also not pictured),
This week we started off by finishing off our frames and making sure that all the dips were facing outward because that was where the backs would fit in.
Then we placed in the middle piece and glued in the back, placing magnets on top of it to make sure the glue dried.
Following that we picked up a paintbrush and began painting our recently primed drawers adding more white to the paint every time we started a new one.
When we had finished painting the drawer fronts we hooked them up on the hooks that we had previously put in and let them dry.
After that we began putting together our drawers.
We took as many laser cut pieces as we needed for eight boxes and arranges them like so, then applied glue to the edges and stood them upright, this is what our drawer would look like, then all we had to do was put on rubber bands to make sure everything stayed in place and waited for it to dry.
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At stem club, my group have been using the sewing machines to make our own tote bags. We had to use the zigzag stitch and the straight stitch.
I had never used a sewing machine before so it was a new experience. I learned that you need to reverse stitch at the start and end of any line you sew otherwise the stitch will come apart.
To start with, it was quite difficult to get the technique right but by the end of this project I was really getting the hang of it. Using a sewing machine is definitely a good thing to know how to do because there are a lot of jobs you would need to know how to sew for like making spacesuits.
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By Kenzyl and Samuel
Hi I'm Kenzyl and in this lesson we learned about machine advantage and machine learning.
As our group always starts, we look into the weekly question. we look into different types of blood and how they are different. Nigel explained about antigens and how some and some can’t mix.
Nigel explaining about antigens on the grey wall.
After the weekly question we went to the main activity. First, Nigel made a tricky hangman game that eventually spelled mechanical advantage.
Nigel writing down some of the letters of hangman.
Then we looked at pulleys. Nigel talked about machine advantage, when without a machine the job would be harder. With one pulley, pulling a weight the same distance had no advantage, but when we used 3 pulleys, the job was much easier.
The first test.
Testing if more pulleys has an advantage.
Close to the end of the session, Nigel showed us about axles, and we got to make some out of lego! and then how our main project works, a solar powered and hand cranked usb charger.
The phone is charging from the charger.
At the end of the session, Nigel showed us mini oscilloscopes and how they work. Nigel had constructed them himself.They were fun and the session was huge fun!
The oscilloscope is functioning well.
Hi we are Alice and Eva. We are your writers and demons. Me, Eva, I’m the Cheese Demon. And Alice is the Birb Demon. But enough about us. I assume you want to know about what happened at STEM class. It was a noisy experience. Sorry, that was cringy.
Here’s our class!
I’m the one in the NASA shirt wondering why she exists, heh. Alice is the smol one doing the hit or miss pose. Then there’s Zaden (the dude in the black shirt), Bailey (wearing the yellow and black jacket- oh hey, Bee Movie), Caden (who’s not in the photo), and Paige (also not in the picture). Oh, and of course, Jonathan, our amazing teacher!
As you can see, we’re gathered around a large speaker. Hang on.. I got a better photo of it..
Jonathan built an incredible, incredibly simple speaker. With just some wire, a crap ton of tape, and some blue construction paper, we could hear people talking on the radio. Cool!
Jonathan played low-frequency and high-frequency sounds through different speakers; a small one and a large one. The smaller one handled high-frequency noises better, while the larger one dealt with low-frequency noises better. I took a photo of the inside of a speaker for no reason. Hehe.
Well- there’s my notes-
Some people had the idea to put water in the speaker and then play noises through it. Jonathan put plastic wrap on the top first. (killjoy) (NO I WAS JOKING YOU’RE THE BEST TEACHER ;-;)
Here’s the frequency-maker-thing.
The waves are extremely small and close together, making a trippy (yet cool) illusion. It’s hard to see in the camera though. :(
When we kept turning the frequency up, The waves became even smaller to the point where we couldn’t even see them.
If you look closely around the edges, you can see it slightly bends upwards. There are also air bubbles caught in the water.
Jonathan brought in a bucket with the bottom cut out and covered with a piece of cloth. He filled the bucket with smoke from a... well, a smoke machine. I assume you aren’t stupid. I assume..
When he puffed out the cloth on the bottom, smoke came out the top, through the circular hole cut in paper. It’s hard to see in this photo, but you can see the smoke okay.
I didn’t take any pictures of this part, but we went outside and filmed Zaden clapping two wooden boards together from a relatively far distance. And me and Alice were on comms! Very chill. When we got back to the classroom, we used a video editing program to figure out how big the delay was.
Sorry about the terrible photo, it was the only one I took.
I was in the bathroom for quite a while after that (DON’T JUDGE ME WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE), so I didn’t really help figure out what the speed of sound was. Here’s the whiteboard though.
Oh, one more thing.
Jonathan put a beeping mechanism in a bottle and put some kind of vacuum-thing on top, which sucked out all the air and made the noise stop. Because noise needs air to travel through, when there’s no air, there’s no noise.
Well, that’s all there is to talk about. I hope I’ll see you people again soon!!
CHEESE DEMON OUT
The bridge was 35 grams. I think the more weight lost, and more stability, the more indestructible the bridge is. I felt good when the bridge survived. We added double triangles, I believe the secret is triangles.
I am begging to go to STEM.
Isaac T Franklin
Sunday 12:30 class
We modeled our bridge for Thomas on the old Taramakau Road/Rail bridge near Hokitika. Initially the trusses were designed to be up top, but the train wouldn’t fit so we inverted!
Our emphasis was on light and strong. All glue welds were pretty chunky. What a fun exercise!
Dad - Matt
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These are some the resources that we used to make our egg drop contraptions. About half of the group thought it would be a good idea to draw a plan of their design. We did it in our notebooks, then we got to work…
The plastic wrap stops the egg from splatting everywhere if the contraption doesn’t work.
This is the start of one project. The note book beside him has the drawing plan for his egg contraption.
This is the same contraption finished. Do you think it will work?
On this contraption the balloons act like landing gear. I think it might work.
Do you think that the paddle pop sticks are just for decoration or are for something else?
How the mechanism that drops the eggs works:
The blue string lifts the contraption 5 meters high in the air.
The white string releases the egg in it’s contraption.
Do you think this contraptions parachute bag will work?
This one was originally a cube but the rubber bands got too tense and it imploded just before launch!
We dropped it just like this: already busted.
Do you think that the sticks will still take the force for the egg?
you can have a go if you want to at home and see what you can make!
It STILL WORKED.
I took my egg home.
The sweet taste of victory!!!
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I am in Makeroom’s J Friday class (Big Ooof) and I have enjoyed Makeroom because you get to work with completely different things each week and the atmosphere is funny and interesting.
On Friday 8th November, my class was working with Me Uno Shields. Me Uno Shields are USB connected boards with 8 ports that supply different things. You can attach different objects into the Me Uno Shield and program them on M-Block (which is basically Scratch 2.0 but with new blocks for stuff for LED strips and 7 segment displays). After that you can upload the program to the Me Uno Shield.
(not mine)
(still not mine)
(mine)
I enjoyed myself. I made a program that made the light on an LED strip move by turning a potentiometer and have a 7 segment display count the potential. There was a bug where the colours flash sometimes instead of fading into each other, and it was to do with the colour-change code, but I fixed it.
Me!
We did programming with a lot of tools. And next week we are going to have a robot race. I did most of the programming. But dad helped me a little. I can not wait for the robot race programming. Programming is fun.
I LOVE STEM!
14th August
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Kia ora
My name is Lenny, I just turned 9 and I started STEM Club this term and LOVE it! We are lucky as our group has the best teacher…Hamish! Hamish was in a very good mood today. =)
Today we built our own electromagnetic station.
We did this in three parts:
We each got given a battery pack, a terminal block (chocolate block), a wooden base and screws:
First, we screwed the chocolate block onto the wooden base,
connected the wires from the battery pack to it and glued the battery pack on.
Next, we needed to do some ‘tampering’ with sandpaper, just like the Ozzie cricket player =) Watch Arya and Reuben on the photo below:
In our case we did not do this to cheat, but to remove the coating from the coil – ie we bared the wires of the coil before we wound it around a big nail.
We then created an open circuit by connecting the wire ends to the chocolate block, one negative one positive. Then we put our ‘switch’ (= little insulated nail) in the right spot on the chocolate block to close the current AND tadaaaa…with the closed circuit we could pick up a paper clip with the nail!
We did this by tampering with (sanding ends) and rolling up another long piece of coil around a paper straw. We took it off the straw and had a little wire tunnel which we connected to the chocolate box. By connecting the ‘switch’ to that we could hold and move the nail inside the tunnel…very cool!
Yes, we did more ‘coil tampering’ – i.e. bared the ends of another 4 meters of coil - which we then rolled into a circle, this is the blue wire you can see in the picture below.
Hamish then did his magic and attached this on a piece of wooden stick that he had soldered before.
We then had to screw the circle shaped wires onto the two wooden blocks on the base and fit the stick with the blue coil in there.
And yes, you guessed right, in order for this to create a circuit later we had to connect the cables to the chocolate block. Look at Aria working away.
Then something cool happened: We got given three magnets each, and by ‘switching’ on the circuit for this and holding the magnets next to the blue wire thingy, this started to rotate very fast! Tadaaa- our motor was finished.
Thanks to all the preparation that Nigel did before the class (assembling the terminal block, preparing the cables and wires etc) we finished in time to have a good play with our station. THANK YOU NIGEL! =)
During class we got slightly distracted by two visitors in the backyard:
- a very cute cat. Hmmm, maybe this is Nigel’s?
- my not-so-cute older sister…what the heck is she doing?!?
I really like STEM Club, as I learn something new every week and I love tinkering and creating things.
My mum says she also learns a lot by helping me during class. She hopes that one day we will build a Flux capacitator…REALLY, she enjoys STEM Club so much she wrote the draft of this blog and I only kind of signed it off…
I wish I could do STEM Club every day! Thank you Hamish and Nigel – you are awesome sharing your knowledge with us and making it so fun.
By Lenny (and his mum Susanne)
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Hi!
This is Ben here doing Blog for my second time!
So today we made a shelf out of a book (which Nigel calls the Book bookshelf), but before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story. The question of the week was – how long would your DNA be if you took it out of your body and placed it end to end?
Answer: If you stretched the DNA in one cell all the way out, it would be about 2m long and all the DNA in all your cells put together would be about twice the diameter of the Solar System. OR Your DNA could stretch from the earth to the sun and back ~600 times.
WOW! That’s long!
The Book Bookshelf:
Nigel told us today that we would be using a new tool: a hacksaw! We used a ruler to measure how long our aluminium rods had to be.
Next, we cut it with our hacksaw.
Once we had done that, we drilled holes on the aluminium with drills so that we could put screws in them.
Next we went into the classroom to watch a video about the history of aluminium. It turns out that aluminium used to be more valuable than GOLD! But now it has some serious competitors now, like titanium and carbon. And at the end, Nigel showed us what it looks like to drill-press metal, and for one I can tell you it looked GOOD.
Hi, My name is Arya. It’s been 5 weeks for me here at stem club. I wanted to do some coding and science experiments.
We, a group of 5 children - Jai, Lenny, Reuben, Aria and me work with Hamish and made our own cubbie box in week-1, dismantled some electrical and electronic devices in week-2, scaled and made a solar system model in week-3 and learnt to code in week-4.
Hamish started the session with an interesting question, “How many computers are there in your home?". Initially, we started writing down the count of laptops and computers we had at our home. Later Hamish explained to us about various other computers we have at our home, like dishwasher, washing machine, mobiles, Television and many more. We re-counted the computers and wrote them down on the white board
We were presented with various computers and were told that we could program them. In this session, we programmed micro-bit.
Various small programmable Computers (microprocessor)
Micro::bit
Hamish handed each one of us a micro-bit, a USB cable, battery and a folder with some sample projects. We logged into the computer and hit microbit.org in the browser, where we programmed referring to the sample project. We all started with a code for a flashing-heart display in the micro-bit. We then downloaded the code to micro-bit, by connecting it to the computer with the USB cable. We could see the program running in micro-bit. Then we plugged in the battery to it to see if the program was still running.
I made a “Compass” and “Rolling-Dice”. The rolling dice showed me different numbers every-time I shook the micro-bit. We all tried to bring in 6 on the dice.
Me with micro-bit Compass
Rolling-dice
Interested to see Jai’s name in the micro-bit? I tried the same. It was fun trying it out.
Jai
Arya
]]>It's been another great few weeks at MakeRoom, all our new classes are settling in really well and the feedback has been awesome. There are now over 90 individual tote trays in the workshop - WOW!
Meanwhile my groups started the term with our traditional engineering challenge. This time round it was Catapults.
Here are the materials the kids had to work with...
...and here is the challenge brief:
So, yes. At the end of the class it all came down to 4 shots. Every successful shot was added to the shooters tally. By the time final testing came round there were some fantastic designs on show:
But even the most impressive constructions weren't always successful when it really mattered...
It was really interesting seeing everyone wrestle with the dilemma of choosing between reliability (and the chance of getting 4 successful shots) or going for the long range winner. The record currently stands at just under 8 metres - which was a combination of 3 successful shots. Impressive!
There you go, another great week at Stem Club. This term we have some great projects planned. Illuminated light signs, an interesting project involving Readers Digest Condensed Books and more DIY.org madness. Stay tuned for all the details!
]]>Hi, my name is Harry Yarrall and I’m 10 years old.
The reason I do stem club is because I really enjoy learning the cool things in life like how we learned about kinetic and potential energy and those weekly questions.
I’ve been going to stem club for the last year and the start of this one and I really adore it.
This week’s session was about…well it was meant to be making a cool glowing box but we did a thing just for us…We sent a 360 camera...
...into the sky using string and 25 helium filled balloons!!!!! My favourite session by far!
What we learned at last week’s stem club was more about 360 degree images and how they work...
...and we even made our own and it looked super cool!
I loved it when we did our own 360 image...
... and it was super funny how we could see all of us making silly faces, also I really loved it when we sent the 360 camera into the sky because when we put the VR goggles on...
...we got to see us jumping underneath the camera trying to grab at the balloons.
The most tricky part was when we were trying to put the balloons on the camera...
...because the balloons kept on popping when they hit the lights and the hooks on the ceiling, and at one point we ran out of helium, so we had to get a parent to go out and buy another container of helium!
The whole time at Stem club was funny. What was really funny, was when we floated the camera in the sky because everyone was jumping and laughing making jokes, making silly faces and reaching for the balloons.
NEW SPACE
Our new classroom is officially up and running. Months of planning have finally borne fruit and we have our second space built and ready for action.
Having had all the planning permissions complete last year Lucy and I started the ‘deconstruction’ back in January…
…and we had builders here most of Term One.
We put the finishing touches on during the school holidays.
And finally - check it out!
Doesn’t it look cool! We still have a couple of bits and pieces to add (like a new heatpump) but other than that it’s all functioning beautifully.
NEW TUTORS AND NEW FAMILIES
A new space would be nothing without new faces to occupy it and we are very pleased to have 3 new tutors onboard. Jonathan, Hamish and Evangelina come to us with a huge range of experience and it is really exciting to be welcoming their talent into MakeRoom. We spent much of Term One getting them familiar with the space and now that they are fully on board we have been able to offer 9 new classes - with a bit of room for even more. Our student numbers have doubled from Term 1! All these new groups have started this week and it has been so good welcoming all the new families into the space. Alongside the new room is a new sink and we’ve incorporated a fridge and tea making station for the parents. Sometimes heaven is a cup of tea.
Do come and have a look at the new work when you come next visit.
STEM CLUB FIELD TRIP
During the school holidays we were very lucky to arrange a Stem Club field trip to Victoria University. Through the computer science outreach co-ordinator Pravin Vaz we got to visit the computer science labs as well as some of the engineering department. There was VR, Robotics, Super-conductors as well as some very interesting examples of old school tech (that sounds like something out of Mortal Engines). We got to spend an amazing couple of hours seeing some of the tertiary avenues available to our students as they get older.
TERM ONE BUILDS
Finally - we had a sizeable 6 groups doing DIY.org projects towards the end of last term. For those who have no idea what DIY.org sessions are they are a block of classes devoted to individual projects that the children have chosen themselves. They take a bit of organising but are very rewarding for everyone involved.
I wanted to share a handful of the projects that were built during these classes because they were truely awesome.
Check them out:
So there you have it. A quick tour through what’s been going on at MakeRoom over the last couple of months. We will work to keep the blogs a bit more regular moving forward - hopefully some of our new groups will be keen to share their experiences of Stem Club. Roll on Term Two!
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I am ten years old (nearly eleven though).
This is our second week of a four-week project: making Bugbots. To start with in week 1, Nigel had already cut out the wooden bases of the Bugbots with the laser cutter. It was our job to spray paint them. I made mine look a bit like a starry night.
This week we started off screwing an Arduino UNO onto a sheet of plastic which was also cut by laser and was made to fit under our wooden bases for the bug bot.
The next step was to put a sensor shield on top of our Arduino UNO.
A sensor shield means that we can access the inputs and outputs of the Arduino more easily.
Following on from that the next step was to put on our motors so that our bug bot can move. Next week or the week after that we are going to attach the wheels onto the motors so that it can drive.
Our next task was to strip and tin the wire ends. For stripping we used a little red wire stripper to remove about 1 cm of the rubber covering to lay the ends of the wire bare.
Tinning the wires means covering the bare wire ends with solder. This was done using the soldering iron. We needed to do this in order to be able to solder the wires onto the motors.
Here is a picture of the bugbot so far, including the motors, the Arduino UNO underneath the sensor shield, and the Motor Controller, which allows the Arduino to control how fast each of the motors go and in what direction.
After all these steps, Nigel gave each of us a piece of wood shaped like the one in the photo below. We screwed these bits of clear plastic onto it. This will be the front of the bug bot and later on, touch sensors will be added to the pointy bits, so whenever the bugbots bump into something, the sensor will click and send a signal to the Arduino, and the bugbot will reverse and change direction.
This is what I started my bugot base off with: my starry night wooden base and a sheet of clear plastic which is a bit smaller than the blue base.
I would recommend stem club for you if you are interested in making cool things, it is SUPER awesomely fun!
By Heidi Smale( from the silly sausages!!!!!!!!!)
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Hi I’m Ben
This is my second year at STEM club and I am psyched!
Today’s focus was Virtual Reality (Probably the best class I’ve ever done!)
First we talked about the different dimensions: 1d, 2d, 3d, and 4d.
Nigel demonstrated the different Dimensions using paper.
1 Dimension = a line
2 Dimension = a square
3 Dimension = a cube
4 Dimension = Time (or it could be demonstrated as a hypercube or tesseract)
Nigel drew a picture of Henry and Clem being flat in a 2D world. When Paper Clem showed Paper Henry how to jump his little flat mind was BLOWN! He explained that if you went into a higher dimension than yours no-one would see you. His demonstration was pretty funny.
We see 3d because we have two eyes. They both see from different perspectives. For example we looked at a bottle with one eye covered then the other. Every time we did so it moved a little because each eye receives a slightly different image that the brain processes as one.
Next we put on some VR headsets called Oculus Go. They were SO COOL!!
Everyone went into Space. Everyone, but me! I was magically transported to... A LIVING ROOM!!
Next we watched a 3D video with lots of different scenes from lots of different countries for example sand buggy races, skiing and Niagara Falls.
How VR works:
After that, we went onto a thing called CoSpaces where you can go into loads n’ loads of worlds in 3D(soooo fun.).
We then went on the computers and made our own worlds in CoSpaces! Mine was called “Um...” because it had so many random things in it.
We ran out of time so I hi-fived Nigel and left.
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Stem Club has just finished its first week back and as everyone arrived fresh from the holidays they got to see some of the big changes that have been taking place at MakeRoom.
Yes, our builders are in and we’re pleased to say that in a few weeks time we will have our second classroom space up and running. This week we start working with our new tutors so that come the start of term two we can double our capacity and have two classes running at the same time! Very exciting. So if you have friends for family on the waitlist the waiting should soon be over!
Speaking of classes, it is becoming a tradition to have the first week of each term as our Engineering Challenge week. So for almost all our groups we had great sessions scratching our heads, coming up with solutions to not so everyday problems.
Questions like:
How strong can you make a bridge out of Spaghetti?
And how slowly can you travel down a zipline?
One of the things that makes Engineering Challenges fun is all the interesting bits and pieces that get spread out for everyone to use. This week many of our groups were introduced to bearings (those are the things that make Fidget Spinners spin) amongst other things.
We have some great projects planned for the year so stay tuned for much making merriment. Next week our new VR equipment is going to get its first outing...
Have a great day!
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Welcome to the last blog post of 2018! We've wrapped up an awesome year of classes and are looking forward to a bit of a break and some sun.
Last weekend we had our End Of Year Celebration - a great chance to have all our Stem Club families together in one space and to acknowledge the work the kids have done over the last 12 months. Of course we couldn't just leave it at that, we had to have some cool activities and challenges in place to make things a bit more interesting.
For the event we had hired the Miramar North School hall. We split everybody into teams (including one parents team) and had 8 activities laid out both inside and outside. There were originally 10 activities but a couple proved a bit too tricky on the day. Everything from engineering challenges to driving robots to predicting the future. Interspersed with some fantastic afternoon tea it was a great few hours. Check out the pics below.
On a personal note I'd like to thank everyone that helped make Stem Club possible this year. Our parents have been awesome and the kids are a joy to work with. We very much look forward to doing it all again next year. Our builders are coming in during January to work on the new classroom space so 2019 is going to be another great year.
Enjoy the break everybody - keep safe and see you all in 2019!
Cheers
Nigel
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TEXT AND PHOTOS BY VIRAAJ RAVJI OF THE GUINEA PIGS
Hi, I’m Viraaj and I’m a student from the Guinea Pigs class (The best class in my opinion). This week was a pretty successful class, from working in the garage to technical robot stuff.
Two weeks ago we started designing our boxes before carving them out on the Laser Cutter. Plus we had to cover the box with tape before cutting, to prevent char on the edges.
One week ago we started glueing the box sides together and placed rubber bands around the box to keep it together while the glue dry.
This week we took off the rubber bands and applied a coat of clear polyurethane,and then we all ended up with a wet box with drips of polyurethane, well I did.
Paul’s
Ritesh’s
Luka’s
Mine
Otto’s
Next we needed to work with our BugBot’s (mini robots) we made in term 3. We wanted to add a Ultrasonic sensor to allow the BugBot to sense objects. The Ultrasonic sensor looked like eyes for the robot.
We first added the Ultrasonic sensor on some perspex by screwing them on. Next we drilled some holes into the timber on our BugBot to screw the other piece of perspex and then mounted our sensor on there using the hot glue gun. And then as always the jumper wires to hook onto our arduino board on our bots. We then loaded code provided by Nigel into the BugBot which uses the Ultrasonic Sensor to detect an object ahead of the BugBot and change direction. We then had four BugBots with working Ultrasonic sensors.
Our next project was adding line following sensors under our bots.This was a little bit harder than the Ultrasonic Sensor just because of how fiddley it was to put together. There were these little pieces of plastic to put the line following sensors into. We then need to hook up the wires to the arduino board and add in the code. The one thing about the code was that we couldn't have the Ultrasonic Sensor and the Line Following Sensor both work at the same time, so we could only use either one on our bots for the time being.
Hello, i'm Amy, I'm 11 and I started STEM club in term 3. It's SUPER fun and I do it with Heidi, Aviaya, Isabella and samuel. We do new things every week, and this week was the first day of a 3 week project...designing and making concrete pots, which on the last day, we will put a plant in!
These are the steps we had to go through.
First we made the first bits of the mould frame (the base, and two of the of the sides). We nailed them together with drills and clamps.
Then we designed the other two sides of the mould using easel, which would make our pots have pictures on them.
Then we had to carve them onto wood with the CNC, but only Heidi got too see hers getting done! (It's fine though)
(this photo is of someone else's design by the way! It just happened to be here)
We were done with the actual making of the concrete pots so we learnt about atoms and the periodic table. We learnt about protons, neutrons and electrons. Nigel had a wooden board with circles and marbles to show us more clearly.
Me and Heidi decided to write down all the elements of the periodic table in our notebooks, and we got about halfway through!
then we watched a brain pop video on Marie Curie who discovered radium, and also did a brain pop quiz on atoms.
And we got all the questions right! But after that we decided to do it again and get all the questions wrong just for fun!
My favourite parts were probably using the drill, designing the other two sides and all the extra things we did at the end (pretty much all of it!)
One of the challenges was writing down the periodic table, but I still wanted to do it! It was hard to find the element that came next because they are not in number order, which was how I was writing it.
The whole day was really fun and interesting and I would DEFINITELY recommend stem club if you aren't in it already.
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Salutations from the mid 1600’s. My name is Luka The Unknown, knowledgable Knight from the far reaches of this great realm. Over the past week I have conducted a series of interesting experiments to do with the resulting beam of light when the sun is shone through a Shiny Stone.
We used this arcane magic to burn through ….
… forgive me dear reader, I was accidentally writing the diary entry for 7 days forth.
Using my great powers that I have been gifted I shall now recount the tale of…
“The Merchant of Ali Express”
A long time ago I and my four companions were trekking through the lost darks of the In Ter Swamp. We were exploring an ancient temple when suddenly the ground fell out beneath us and we fell into a giant net. The tallest of my four companions, Paul The Wanderer, was the first to escape it’s clutches. Once we had all gotten out of this net the lights flickered on. There was a stall, a far few metres from us. There was a man behind it, he called out “Greetings, my name is Ali Express. I will grant each of you one wish. You can choose any electronic item, but there is a catch. Each item must be compatible with this!”. He held up a small blue rectangle. “This,” he proclaimed, “is an Arduino. It is a controllable piece of equipment that any aspiring warrior must have if they wish to be a master.” “But how does it work?” one of my other companions - Otto The Twelfth asked. Ali Express gave us a theatrical duo; a wink and a shrug. “Nobody knows,” he said. “Now, make your choices. I have all of these fine choices”. From the merchants great stock we could only choose 5.
It took most of us quite some time to decide but Otto The Twelfth was dazzled by a device that seemed to produce people talking from seemingly nowhere.
Paul chose a magical ring of lights that changed colour whenever Ali Express snapped his fingers.
My two soforth unnamed companions, Ritesh The Archer and Viraaj The Stealthy were fascinated by an invisibly connected button that turned on a light and a screen that displayed scrolling words respectively.
I in turn was enthralled by a tag searching mechanism that sensed when you had the right piece of material.
We had made our choices so we went back to the merchant. “Aah, good. You will receive your object is about 40 sun cycles. Goodbye.” Once again the ground opened up beneath us and we were flung back into the temple from whence we came, screaming questions like “But, how do we use this?”, “ What do we do with it?”. Eventually we were forced to wait the 40 days. And true to his word, the merchant Ali Express came to our castle in the night and left a package on the castle drawbridge. At least we think it was Ali Express. Who can be sure?
And so here you find us dear reader. Paul, Viraaj, Ritesh, Otto and I studied these devices thoroughly. But there was something missing, Viraaj was the first to discover. “But where do we find that blue Arduino thing?”, he asked. Suddenly, almost in a cliche like fashion, there was a knock on our dungeon door. Without waiting for a reply the merchant Ali Express opened the door. He was carrying a large cardboard box filled with bags. These were the missing blue boards, the final link in the puzzle. Once we had done a thorough inventory check Ali Express bid us “Farewell! I must be going, I have many more goods to deliver”. He gave us a polite curtsey and left.
THE END
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Well the dust has settled, the mountain of e-waste is almost recycled and MakeRoom has returned to its usual level of ‘almost tidy’. Wellington’s first ever Maker Faire has been and gone and we’re feeling it went pretty well.
I wanted to share some of the photo’s we took while on our booth. We ran a display that showed some of the kids work as well as giving everyone something to get their hands into. All our Stem Club students (wearing awesome MakeRoom T-Shirts) got stuck in and were helping members of the public pull apart our mountain of E-waste. At one point we thought we might run out but fortunately that didn’t happen.
At the centre of it all was the MakeRoom sign that we constructed for the event. Again, our Stem Club kids helped put that together so it was very much a team effort. Thank you everybody!
Our efforts were well rewarded, our booth was very popular and we even won an award for the most interactive and engaging stall. Big thanks to the organizers - Capital E. Hopefully this will become a yearly event. We will definitely be back.
See you all soon. Enjoy the pics!
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Hi! I’m Aidan - the keeper of egg puns for this week :D
STEM Club is fun, gets me making stuff, gets my mind working to make cool contraptions.
This week’s session was the engineering challenge, aka Egg Drop.
We had had to postpone this challenge for a few weeks because it was windy and rainy (hello Wellington). This week the weather was positively sunny side up, which made it a great day for our Egg Drop Challenge.
Nigel set us up with a scenario where we were to launch the newest spacecraft to Mars. We were the engineers who had to make the contraptions that would make sure it landed safely. I really liked how Nigel set up the scenario for us. It made it fun and egg-citing and inspired us with our own designs.
I enjoyed this challenge very much and there were some tricky bits. We had to make sure the eggs were well padded and try to slow down our capsules for landing. It’s HARD boiled to get the egg to land safely, so having to think about how to keep the egg from breaking when dropped from 5 metres high is a challenge. We all enjoyed working through this.
- this is how high up we dropped our contraptions from!
I built my contraption out of plumbers pipe insulation and I put a parachute on mine. This slowed it down just enough so that the egg didn’t crack.
In the end only one egg got scrambled!
This might have been my favourite week ever since starting Stem Club earlier this year. Others in our group said the same thing!
Some of the other designs included shock absorbers
...different sorts of parachutes, and balloons.
Now it’s time to meet some of the contraptions:
We have The Floating Cushion
The Jellyfish
The Adventurer
The Jet Pack
And The Cup
I would recommend the egg drop for anyone who wants a fun and creative challenge! It’s egg-ceptional! ;)
PS. This is our group with the STEM Club mascot we made
Hi, I'm Ritesh
I have been in stem club for two years.
I come to stem club to learn about hands on things that schools don't teach and to have fun learning about my hobbies such as science, technology and so on. I think stem club is a great place with awesome people.
Today, we programmed the BugBots to do whatever we liked. First we tinkered with the program so that the bots moved in a straight line instead of slowly turning whilst moving forwards. Then we read the BugBots code sheet so we knew what code did what things, then we started coding.
Otto coding his robot
After that we worked on a big sign that said "MAKER" that Nigel had built. Paul drilled holes into a medium sized box with perspex and Otto was screwing the arduino uno onto a piece of wood. Viraaj was soldering and tinning wires onto a voltage regulator and Luka was researching what pins did what on the voltage regulator. I soldered and tinned wires onto a voltage regulator and tinned a plug for the maker sign.
Paul working on the box for the maker sign
The hardest part for me was soldering the voltage regulators, they were small and the wires kept moving. The easy part was the coding, it was simple because it was in the format scratch uses. The funny thing was that Luka and Otto kept turning on the music and it kept changing halfway through the song.
I think today was a pretty simple and funny day at stem club. Make sure you join stem club if you haven't, it's really fun.
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Hi I’m Austin and I have been going to Stem Club since it started. I am a founding member. Stem Club is ………. AWESOME!!!!!
And this is what happens when you make bridges out of spaghetti and put it to the test.
The challenge was to make a bridge out of spaghetti and you had three glue sticks and that was all. You were not allowed to use anything else. It went well. Eli was using triangular shapes like this.
Whereas Vinnie used layers.
Now for the comedy. Everyone started eating the spaghetti!!! Hahahaha what fun.
About half of this was gone…
… by the time we finished with it.
The mechanism was simple. Weigh your bridge then put your bridge in between the two blocks and hook the bucket on. Continuously pour water in the bucket until your bridge breaks.
Then when your bridge collapses you should see this.
Thanks for reading this. Remember, follow MakeRoom Wellington on Facebook.
]]>We spent the last week of Stem Club madly trying to finish all our end of term projects. For our weekday groups this meant soldering and assembling the last bits of our Portable Amplifiers. Everyone did awesome work and by the end of Friday we had successfully sent home 15 brand new personalised sound systems.
Our weekend groups had the mammoth task of completing their Bug Bot Robots. We'd already finished most of the construction so this week was all about wiring and getting things going.
I think I’ve mentioned it before but I’m really impressed at how well the soldering skills of all our groups are coming along. And you always know it's going to be a good week when the whiteboard looks like this:
Wiring our robots together was actually pretty tricky. First - we had to solder some RGB LED's and mount them on to short lengths of irrigation tube. These were used as 'antennae' for our Bots. Once these were in place we had to screw the frame together and thread all our wires through to the small board that has the resistors mounted on it.
At this point things got REALLY fiddly and I ended up making some changes from our Saturday groups through to our Sunday groups. Designs can always be tweaked and it's never nice to rush things too much - although it did mean that our Stem Club parents got quite a work out helping their kids get through this. It turns out attaching the LED wires to the resistor board was really tricky so we adapted the design to include jumper wires and header terminals to avoid this step. Although we did send some of the Robots home for the school holidays we'll be spending a bit of time next term making sure everyone understands how to program their creations and (for our sunday groups) just finishing up connecting our wires to the board.
But already they look amazing and everyone should be rightly proud of the work they've put in. On top of finishing these robots off next term we're also going to add some ultrasonic sensors as well as line following capabilities.
Next term we also have some extra special things to look forward to. Wellington's first ever Maker Faire is being held on the 4th of November in Shed 6 on the waterfront. We are going to be there and we're planning on having as many of our young makers as we can fronting our booth. Construction is well underway to make MakeRoom's presence engaging and entertaining. Save the date!
And the other big thing that is heading our way in Term 4 is the construction of our second class room space. Our one main studio space is just not going to be enough to accommodate our growing wait list so we are taking advantage of our large basement and turning some of that area into a second teaching space. This should be all up and running for the beginning of Term 1 2019 and the big challenge now is finding some great facilitators to help us teach the Stem Club program - any suggestions or tips more than welcome!
So that's it for Term 3. Thanks to everyone that has helped make it all possible. We look forward to doing it all again in Term 4!
Nigel
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Another quick update on what all our young makers at Stem Club have been up to. We’re rapidly heading towards the end of term so that means it’s time for our big end of term projects.
Our Tuesday and Thursday groups have starting work on building Portable Amplifiers. These are powered by a 9v battery and based around a small circuit that uses the LM386 chip. This session started with everyone sanding their pieces of Ply (pre-cut on the CNC) and wood staining them. Then we got stuck into soldering the board together.
Over the last couple of terms these groups have developed some pretty impressive soldering skills and there will be another opportunity to put these into practice next week as we pull together the various components needed to make this board fully functional.
Our Weekend classes have also started a challenging project. Having spent lots of time learning about the Arduino Uno boards we decided it was time to get everyone using one to its full potential. Cue our Bugbot project…
We started by having a look at some of the amazing robots out there in the world, noting how many of them have been influenced by animals.
Our BugBots certainly look as though they’ve been influence by nature and we’re using ‘feelers’ to tell us when we’ve run into something.
The first step was to glue together a couple of our laser cut pieces - the wheels and battery holder (that sits on our Bots back).
Then it was back into the soldering and assembling, starting with our geared motor mechanism and power switch.
Once that was done the glue on our main MDF board was dry enough to allow everyone to get out the spray paint and decorate their robot frame. There were lots of different colours available so in a couple of weeks we will have some very vibrant Bots heading out into the world.
Some of the groups even got into mounting their Arduino and Motor Controller onto the Perspex sheet that forms the base of the Bot.
And that's pretty much where we got to. Next week we’ve got some quite complicated LED mechanisms to build, as each ‘feeler’ has an RGB LED on the end of it. Actually there’s quite a few gloriously fiddly bits with this thing so there will be a lot of patience required.
Once these bugs go home everyone will have a functioning programmable robot that they built and can modify as much as they like. I think that’s pretty awesome!
Keep watching.
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Most of our weekend groups started a big programming project using Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu). All our Makers have used Scratch extensively, for programming our Mbots and Arduino’s, but this week we were using it to make a straight computer game.
Although Scratch works in a very visual fashion, moving blocks around to create a structure of sequential commands…
…it is a great way to learn key code concepts for textual languages like Python and C. The two concepts we explored with this game were ‘broadcasting’ - where one part of a program can communicate with another, and ‘clones’ - where one object within the game can create copies of itself, negating the need to duplicate lots of code.
There was a comprehensive folder of instructions available but many of the steps were deliberately a bit vague - encouraging everyone to experiment and work things out for themselves.
The game is based around our “Hero” sprite having to collect objects while being chased by “Baddies”.
Although the folder used “Taco” as the objects to collect and “Flaming Cheese” as the baddies, everyone got to modify their game to their own personal tastes. The main mechanics or engine of the game stayed the same for all versions.
There were some really interesting ideas coming through and we will finish up these games next week.
Our Senior group also had a great challenge this week. Last term they built some Arduino base boards, which consisted of basic modules alongside an Arduino Uno and power supply. This week they were presented with a small 8 segment LED display to add to their board, however all they were given was the module itself and the order page from AliExpress (the website they were ordered from).
Using this information everyone had to research how the module worked, how to connect it to their Arduino and what programming was needed to get it going. The challenge was accepted quickly and the computers were in action forthwith as everyone started their investigations. It turns out that this module has a small integrated circuit in each of its LED’s that allows you to access them individually. This makes for some cool lighting effects. By the end of the class everyone had their strip working and were rightly satisfied with their efforts.
We’re going to expand on this concept next term by getting the group to choose their own modules from AliExpress. We’ll order them and then once they arrive they'll have to repeat this process for the module they’ve chosen. I can’t wait!
Have a great week everybody!
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At Stem Club a few weeks back we watched a cool music video by Wellington based musician Nigel Stanford. He incorporated a pile of sound based physics demonstrations into his track “Cymatics”.
Check it out:
This week we used one of the tricks in this video to start a discussion on video frame rate. It turns out that if you point a video camera at a stream of water interesting things happen when you vibrate that stream at or around the frame rate of the camera.
We created this setup using a Subwoofer speaker, a small motorised pump and a tone generator. Our video camera was operating (as most do) at 25 frames per second so we were using frequencies from around 23Hz up to 27Hz. When we looked at the video feed from the camera the water seemed to freeze in mid air and at times even flow backwards. Awesome!
If just so happened this tied nicely into our main activity of the day which was Stop Motion animation.
Everyone had their own Stop Motion rigs (built using webcams) as well as a plethora of materials to choose from.
We were using a piece of software called iStopMotion (https://boinx.com/istopmotion/mac/). We’ve found It has a nice intuitive interface and just the right amount of flexibility.
In no time at all we had people telling their stories 1 frame at a time.
It was really interesting seeing all the different styles and approaches being used…
…and I was really impressed with how well all the groups concentrated on the task. The older groups especially were so heavily engrossed in what they were doing we could just leave them to it…
And the work that came out at the end was fantastic. Here are a couple of stills…
Towards the end of each session we played a little clip that showed Ardman Animation in the UK doing some of their claymation work. These are the people behind the “Wallace and Gromit” series and the film “Early Man” from last year.
Apparently on a good day they will shoot enough for about 8 seconds of footage. I can report that we far exceeded that with all our groups!
Now we’re just in the process of collecting together everyone's files. We’ll get them edited together shortly so that our animators can share their work with friends and family.
Onwards!
Nigel
]]>Hi, my name is Heidi and I have been going to stem club for about one and a half terms with my friends Amy, Aviaya and Isabella. My brother started stem club from the very beginning and kept bringing home really cool things like a wooden board game box, he also made a kennel for our dog.
I was a bit jealous and also wanted to go to stem club.
This week was pretty exciting. We got to program robots.
First we learnt how to use the robot with the remote control and all the different modes. There was mode A, which was the normal mode, then there was mode B, which made the sensors turn on so it didn’t crash in to anything, and there was also mode C which made the robot drive on the line. There was modes D, E, F and settings but I don’t know what they did.
On the bench we made a line out of black tape, we put our robots into C mode and let them drive around following the line. It was pretty impressive to watch how they drove around on the line all by themselves and knew when to turn corners.
The robots had LED lights inside them which we programmed on the computer to change their colors. We learnt how to do programming at last weeks class so it was easy.
After that we programmed them to be able to do other things. As well as changing their lights they could drive backwards, spin both left and right on the spot, and making a sound when we pressed a specific button on the remote control. Inside the robot were arduino unos which received all the programming and then sent a message to the LEDs and motors. Arduino unos are like rasberry pi’s and are the size of a credit card.
We then programed our robots to drive on the line and over the bridges. The bridges had been made by other classes. Nigel gave each of us a sheet of paper that had a code on it which we needed to copy in order to program them. Some of us put little number plates on our robots so we could identify which one ours was. It was fun watching them go around the track and on the different pathways. If two of them were heading for a crash the robots would sense it and knew to turn around. Pretty amazing!
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