IDEApath @ Noble Academy

Making ideas into things and things into ideas

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Run For Your Life!

The first 4th/5th grade rotation to come through the IDEApath has created one of the coolest projects this year, and it took less than two weeks to create. 

We started by doing an interest inventory of the students. They listed topics or subjects they really liked talking or learning about as well as tools in the IDEApath that they would really like to use. They wrote these responses on post it notes and we put them on the board.

Using a website called Tagul I created this word cloud from their responses, explaining that the words that were the biggest had been used the most. From this we pulled out the most common interests and most desired tools.

We came up with three different project ideas that incorporated animals, cars, sports, 3D printing, poster designing and tools. We were able to get everything in except the sports, but we did make our idea a game. Our game is fairly simple but fun to play. It involves a fair amount of luck but also some strategy. Some students found 3D printable animals that became game pieces, others assembled cars from pieces that came out of our laser cutter, and others worked with me on designing the game board. We prototyped the game on the white board, as well as on a piece of cardboard with stones and lego people as cars.

After several rule revisions we settled on a final set of rules and put it all together; even creating a neat little bit of packaging for it.

And here’s how you play:

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Science Safety Memory Tiles

What better way to memorize something than with a game of Memory? In this project a set of memory tiles were made with the laser cutter. Each matched pair includes a science safety symbol and the meaning that it represents. Match the symbol to its meaning and beat your opponent!

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Living Dioramas

Dioramas have been around as long as there have been shoe boxes, but with a green screen and a chroma key app they can become a little bit more interesting and allow students to demonstrate their knowledge in a fun way. Check it out:

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Make a "Food Chain"

Doing projects with our youngest students often involves a strong focus on a simple concept with a memorable product. To help primary students visualize the concept of a food chain in a different way, Junior High students helped them design a 3D food chain on the 3D printer. After selecting a series of organisms; fungi, plants, insects, birds and mammals, they 3D printed a chain and found 3D models of their organisms to print and attach to the chain. The finished product incorporates the same ideas behind a graphic organizer or drawing but in a product that is more memorable because of the creative process and the different material.

The sun feeds...

Plants and flowers which feed...

small animals like mice, which feed...

predators like hawks, which, when they die, feed...

insects and

fungus, which break down dead things to feed plants and flowers!

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Spanish Wall Calendar

Mrs. Jimenez, our Spanish teacher, asked if we could work with her students to design a calendar that could be used in her classroom. She hoped it would do two things; be useful for marking tests and quizzes and also be used as a teaching aid for days of the week and months of the year. I worked with her students to decide what kind of Spanish calendar they wanted to create, a month by month flip calendar or a full year wall calendar. The flip calendar would allow for more pictures and text while the wall calendar would be better for long term planning.

Sometimes when presented with a choice between A and B, the best answer is C. A student suggested that we might try to do both, create a six month flip calendar. The overall size would be the same as the wall calendar we were talking about, but with a flip up section to show the second half of the year. By laminating the calendar we could make it reusable from year to year as well! IDEApath class student Devin Randal acted as design consultant on the project and he inserted the pictures and text selected by the Spanish students into a design created in Lucidpress and printed on our large format printer.

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Mock Campaign Videos

Our civics students have been exploring the campaign process by developing platforms for Republican, Democratic and Libertarian mock candidates in class and making posters, fliers and campaign ads in the IDEApath. Students used the green screen, tablets and WeVideo to create their campaign ads.Check out each 40 second video in posts below.

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Symmetry and Laser Cutting

It’s not so easy to figure out ways to use the laser cutter with lower school students, but fall and Dia de los Muertes gave us an opportunity to make this happen. To create these laser cut skulls and leaves we started off with hand drawn designs, edited them using a simple phone app, and then generated a vector file in Inkscape. The kids loved the product because it was something new and made with lasers!

We started with half skulls and leaves printed on paper and the students drew in their designs with black sharpie markers.

We used an Android app called Symmetrical to photograph and then add symmetry to the image. We uploaded them to Google Drive and from them into Inkscape. From there I traced the lines to generate a vector file which was fed into our Full Spectrum Laser Cutter. I cut the edges at full power to cut through and the interior lines at low power to etch the designs.

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Junior High Rotation Project - Noble Moves

The very first Junior High six week rotation just completed their IDEApath project, and it was quite an active one! The group started with a variety of low ropes and team challenges to practice their teamwork skills and develop some collaboration strategies.

Then we did a few quick design thinking activities to start identifying the interests that the students had that they might want to incorporate into their project. This is where the subjects of skating and other physical activities started to emerge.

The group decided to focus on creating a video showing slow motion clips of skating, basketball and dance/gymnastics. While this would be the focus of the project, as I have discussed with the students, creativity tends to branch out from the main trunk and ideas start to build on ideas. In addition to their completed video (below) the group 3D scanned themselves posing in their selected activity, we printed 3D models of those scans, some students built a model skate park out of wood for their Tech Decks, made stop motion animations with the 3D models and laser cut designs and images from their activities. Here are some images from the variety of completed projects as well as the finished video.

3D Scanning with Skanect. An Xbox 360 and Skanect software and a rotating platform (with a student as the motor!)

3D prints of students:

Stop motion animations: Link 1  and Link 2

Tech Deck skate park

Laser etched sports photos on scrap wood (Messy Messi)

Student green screen documentary about the project

And of course, the Noble Moves video itself!

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Science Safety Board Game

This game is meant to help teach safety in the science lab. It involved a board game “map” of the science lab, 3D printed game pieces and dice, and cards designed in Google Slides

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Thingmaker action figure

As a step on the way to designing and printing a transformer, Austin used the Thingmaker app from Mattel to design and print this articulated action figure with articulated joints.

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An alternative research paper project filmed in two parts (questions and answers) in front of a green screen and edited in WeVideo.

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This project is a laser cut sword used as a trophy for team building activities. Two layers of blue acrylic make the blade while three thicknesses of 1/4 inch plywood make up the hilt. Based on the movie version of the sword sting from Lord of the Rings. Design created in Inkscape.

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Junior high IDEApath project. To go along with a video they are making showing slow motion footage of skating, basketball and dance/gymnastics, we are creating 3D models. Using Skanect Pro and X box 360 Kinect, we scanned a skater. Student on the floor is rotating the stool with his feet. We are working on a turntable that will be easier.

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Noble Academy logo, edited from a digital file, laser cut and pieced together on the wall of the hallway.