by James | Jan 13, 2023 | Donations, SteamBeans, SteamHead Spaces
Solar panels are a way for an individual to create a tradable commodity: electricity. It often goes unappreciated that even a middle school student is able to create a tradable commodity. And we are not talking about growing a few grains of rice and eating it at home; electricity can be traded for money by any anonymous person with a computer, the internet, and some electricity. In terms of educational philosophy – energy independence is a pillar of the systems thinking that we teach to students of middle school and up. That could be literally electricity, like it is in this case, but it also includes time, money, and even motivation. Esoteric, perhaps, but we can also boil it down to “creating what you want”. In the end we are all required to do so, we are just not taught many ways to accomplish the tasks, nor given many explanations about the systems behind energy.
Exerting your personal preferences is a tough skill for students to gain personal advancement from, because they rarely have support and mentor-ship in discovering their preferences. MakeFashion Edu excels at that. But once you are able to set your own course, knowing the rules of the system is key.
the craigslist posting for our used solar panels
The goal is for students to gain experience with the energy economy by remotely controlling the orientation, storage, and expenditure of energy. Enter: our desert solar panel project!
In 2020 Hot Purple Energy, a solar installer in Palm Springs, California, donated 4 solar panels to kick off our project. We quickly grew it finding a company on Craigslist that had removed old but working panels, and was selling them for a great price.
Our desert land has lots of sun, so why not let our students have access to it? We were teaching 100% remotely at the time as well!
Our progress, in brief, is that our solar and DIY batteries are running and online, but still need an orientation motor system. We currently let students choose from several fixed orientations. Also, the energy gets consumed by our computers in San Francisco, so it’s not the same “electrons” (but also, it never is), and we keep a ledger to account for it.
If any teachers would like to know more, feel free to contact me, and I’ll also be posting details about the batteries, inverter, etc!
by Carrie Leung | Jan 8, 2023 | Events, MakeFashion Edu, Neighborhood Earth, SteamHead Spaces
Written by ChatGPT, Prompt/Edit by Carrie
Over the past two and a half years, our team at SteamHead has had the opportunity to participate in, present at, and even host various online events. While it was a difficult adjustment to go from in-person events to virtual ones, we were grateful for the chance to continue sharing and collaborating with others in the education, maker, and hacker communities.
Through this experience, we have learned a lot about what works well in a virtual setting, some of our top examples are:
- Big Blue Button conference software builds communities on the fly through new ways for attendees to interact with each other and speakers.
- Recorded talks coupled with live interaction boosts production quality AND speaker/attendee interaction.
- Well known but worth a reminder: word clouds, polls, and live surveys (such as Mentimeter) help to engage, and to break up long periods of speech.
- Virtual environments like Mozilla Hubs can facilitate more interaction between participants.
- Making recorded talks accessible after a conference can reach new audiences – different styles of people tune in after hours vs those that attend online conferences!
As the world reopens, we are excited to meet in person again, but we are also grateful for the new remote tools and skills we have acquired. We are looking forward to seeing what new opportunities and connections will come from this experience, and we would like to give a shoutout to all the organizers, presenters, and attendees who have made it possible.
- Hackers on Planet Earth, New York, NY – https://hope.net/
- Make: Maker Kits, Bay Area, CA – https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/plan-c-live-educational-kits/
- MetaEdu, Taiwan – https://www.metaedu.org.tw/events/pause-to-regroup-maker-education-revolution/
- Informa Connect: International Schools, Singapore – https://www.informaconnect.com.sg/conferences/
- Make: MakerCamp, BayArea, CA – https://makercamp.com/partners/make-fashion-edu/
- MakeFashion Edu Virtual Gala, Mozilla Hubs – https://steamhead.space/vme/
- Maker Music Festival, Online – https://www.makermusicfestival.com/
- Office of Educational Technology: Digital Learning Accelerator – https://tech.ed.gov/launching-a-digital-literacy-accelerator/
- Make: MakeHalloween, Bay Area, CA – https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/happy-halloween-maker-camp-spooktacular/
- Maker Ed Convening, Bay Area, CA – https://makered.org/convening-2020/
- High Tech High: Deeper Learning, San Diego, CA – https://deeper-learning.org/
- High Tech High: Deeper Learning, China – https://deeper-learning.org/dlg/
by James | Jan 8, 2023 | Great Projects, James, SteamHead Spaces
Fast and easy 3D building scans: I recently used an iPhone 12 Pro with LiDAR and the PolyCam app to create a 3D scan of the shop floor at Fuse33, a makerspace in Calgary. The resulting 3D data was composed of voxels, and the image was painted on from the iPhone’s camera. It is blurry, but only took about 15 minutes!
While there are other methods for creating 3D scans that will give you a sharper image, such as photogrammetry and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), these methods require rendering the data on a graphics card after taking hundreds of photographs in good lighting conditions. You would need to schedule a whole day, maybe multiple days, for a model of this size to be completed. In contrast, the LiDAR method on the iPhone 12 Pro allows you to render the 3D model on the phone itself, simply by taking a long video.
I am interested in using 3D models of spaces and environments for education. After some moderate successes during the pandemic, I feel that these spaces can help students empathize and relate to different environments differently than seeing text, photos, or even videos. The perspective is not forced, it’s novel/exciting, and it hints at content creation inside virtual spaces. The physical spaces our students have access to varies widely, and avoiding those limitations is something I’m quite excited about but don’t yet know how to fully take advantage of.
In case the above embed does not load for you, here is the link: https://poly.cam/capture/888518EF-6D3B-4CD0-BA35-647FE2FBFEA6
Also here is the exterior of the building: https://poly.cam/capture/66A2B978-2DA3-463C-BE29-8DF1C7AF287A
Some good resources:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/photogrammetry/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/3DScanning
- https://poly.cam
- For the latest in NeRF search for “Instant-NGP”, but fyi it is not quite non-coder friendly yet. here is a simple explainer video though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvXOjV7EHbk
by James | Mar 21, 2021 | Great Projects, Hardi, SteamHead Spaces
Hardi Huang and company created their own pinball machine from scratch! Check out Hardi’s blog for the details on the electronics and circuit design: http://hardihuang.info/blog/2021/03/02/pinball-machine-demo/
One mother of the students involved with this project called me with thanks for SteamHead in providing a place where her son could be expressive, challenged, and empathetic. Where else besides a makerspace can you find those skills in such high demand, and a community that cheers each other on to exhibit them?
