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July 12, 2018

Launching Into the World of Wakanda Through Digital Fabrication

Nettrice Gaskins Culturally Relevant, Leadership Cohort

The SCOPES-DF team worked with educators from our Leadership Cohort, the Fab Foundation’s GE/BCL team, and a developing community of practice to create lessons for our Special Collection that are aligned with the rich design and cultural attributes of Marvel Studio’s “Black Panther” film. The Black Panther Collection represents a timely opportunity to broaden pathways to STEM education by providing inclusive learning experiences at the intersection of cultural expression and technology.

Contributors: Daniel Smithwick and Melvin Laprade (SCOPES-DF), Sarah Wallace (MC2 STEM), Kim Stanley (STEM Chattanooga), Sonya Pryor-Jones (Fab Foundation)

Left, a Zulu woman in the traditional headdress of a married woman; center, a conceptual costume sketch by Ms. Carter (design) and Ryan Meinerding and his team (concept artists); and right, the 3D printed headdress as worn by Angela Bassett in the movie. Credit Getty Images; Marvel; Marvel/Disney

This intersection of cultural expression and technology heightened by mass media, provides a unique opportunity for personalized learning that is transdisciplinary and rooted in acknowledgement and celebration leading to confidence, self-efficacy, and collective advocacy.

This collection offers a specific call and invitation to youth of diverse backgrounds to digital fabrication, by acknowledging and celebrating the cultural attributes of the African diaspora, while leveraging the expertise of our community, which is concerned with developing curriculum that addresses learning standards while illuminating STEM learning as concretely as possible through digital fabrication tools and capabilities.

The Collection

Our goal is to have educators tap this collection, which includes Dora Milaje Tabi Boot, Wakandan Bling, and Celebrating Adinkra through Digital Fab. These lessons have been Fab tested to ensure that educators have access to quality content.

Inspirational women designers from Black Panther – Left: Hannah Beachler, set designer; Center: Ruth Carter, costume designer; Right: Douriean Fletcher, jewelry designer

Wakanda is a fictional African nation that is made up of many tribes, each with its own cultural style and heritage. The Dora Milaje Tabi Boot and Wakandan Bling lessons cover the steps taken to simulate cultural designs and digitally fabricated items worn by characters/actors in the film. These lessons are inspired by Ruth Carter’s approach to costume design for “Black Panther”, which includes combining symbols and patterns from several African cultures. This includes the use of Adinkra, visual symbols that are used extensively in fabrics and pottery. Traditional Adinkra are made using woodcut sign writing, so we used a laser cutter and 3D printer to create symbols/objects and the designs were computer-generated.

Dora Milaje Tabi Boot with 3D printed anklet and embedded electronics (LEDs).

Celebrating Adinkra through Digital Fab shows students how to create custom Adinkra symbols using low-tech art supplies and digital fabrication machines including a 3D printer and vinyl cutter. Students will design and model their symbols using the 3D modeling program, Tinkercad as well as, with help from their teacher, create their own 2D symbol to be made into a sticker.

Geometric Potential of the Adinkra Symbols

One of the things that most inspired us when encountering the Adinkra symbols was their geometric potential. The Dora Milje Tabi Boot and Wakandan Bling lessons include the exploration of free, online computer-based tools that use “heritage algorithms” to help students learn STEM principles as they simulate the cultural artifacts and develop their own 2D creations. This includes the use of an Adinkra CSDT (culturally situated design tool) that allows students to learn a simple programming language to simulate Adinkra shapes.

The “Dwennimmen” symbol simulation using the Adinkra CSDT.

Another starting point is to think about how to take these two-dimensional shapes into three dimensions. From a digital fabricator’s point of view, these symbols contain a rich and varied geometry – a collection of symmetries, solids and voids (holes), and patterns – that could be further manipulated and transformed into artistic and functional material objects.

Adinkra symbol as 2D vector drawing and as 3D printed solids

A good lesson to learn when working with digital fabrication tools and processes is identifying the materials you are working with and learning about the qualities it gives you to play with. From 2D outlines of the symbols one can laser cut the shapes and get the third dimension from the thickness of the materials, which is what we did with the Wakanda Bling earrings. We used 2D drawings to cut out shapes from ¼” thick acrylic, giving us a depth full of colored light and shadow.

Translucent materials provide highlights, color variation and depth to play with.

With 3D printing one can further explore three dimensional geometric transformations of the Adinkra symbols. Take for example one of the symbols for Democracy, below. As a 2D figure this Democracy symbol can be described as diagonally aligned intersecting squares. However, what if these squares were cubes instead and what if the cubes were distributed at different heights?

Democracy symbol as a filled 2D shape and as a set of overlapping squares

Four variations of 3D Democracy symbols that cast the same shadows from above.

Based on the 2D Adinkra symbol (for “Wakandan Bling”), we created a set of solid cubes in TinkerCAD, a free browser-based 3D modeling program. Then, we played with the alignment and distribution of the cubes by dragging them around in space and joining them together to form new solids. We discovered that we could create a set of these symbols, each one a different configuration of cubes in 3D space, but when viewed strictly from the top, they were all the same. Students can find out how many such variations can be made. Teachers and students can follow the lessons to learn how to use these tools/methods to make their projects.

Photo courtesy of Aidan Mullaney.

With this special collection, the SCOPES-DF team took a culturally situated approach to computation and digital fabrication, which has great promise in future projects that seek to foster engagement and motivation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) for all students and especially students from groups that underrepresented in STEM fields.

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February 7, 2018

‘Wrinkling Time’ Through ELA, Geometry & Digital Fab

Nettrice Gaskins Leadership Cohort, Lesson Remix

By Nettrice Gaskins, Kimberly Stanley and Zachary Wenz

Image of Pythagoras and tesseracts remixed using Deep Dream Generator.

Image of Pythagoras and tesseracts remixed using Deep Dream Generator.

Introduction

During the 2017 SCOPES-DF Cohort Launch in Waltham, MA, participants were tasked with taking an existing lesson from the SCOPES-DF website, and making small improvements, adaptations, or extensions to that lesson and demonstrating the use of a digital fabrication process by making a simple artifact that reflects the improvement. Our team consisted of a SCOPES-DF team member Nettrice Gaskins, Kimberly Stanley, English teacher at STEM High School in Chattanooga, TN, and Zachary Wenz, Math teacher at MC2 STEM High School in Cleveland, OH. We were assigned the GeoConstructix lesson plan from the website.

Photo © Stan Rowin stanstudio.com

Photo © Stan Rowin stanstudio.com

A Wrinkle in Time: STEM & Digital Fabrication in Popular Culture kicked off our discussion about the connections between English Language Arts, or ELA, mathematics and digital fabrication. In summary, the overarching theme “wrinkling time” can be explored through geometry and tensegrity, which is a structural principle based on the use of isolated components in compression inside a net of continuous tension. Additionally, the main concept of time portals deals with vectors, which are geometric shapes that have both a magnitude and a direction. With vectors we were able to define operations such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication by scalars. This was the entry point for our discussion about how to remix GeoConstructix, a lesson dealing with similar concepts as tensegrity.

Student exploring tensegrity and a tesseract (time portal) in math class at Boston Arts Academy. Photo courtesy of Nettrice Gaskins.

Student exploring tensegrity and a tesseract (time portal) in math class at Boston Arts Academy. Photo courtesy of Nettrice Gaskins.

GeoConstructix adapts digital fabrication concepts by focusing on the inter-relationship between geometry and computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) techniques. The lesson’s scaffolding structure allows students to work with a series of successive methods-based exercises that rely on both digital modeling and prototypes. By remixing this lesson, the team opened up more possibilities for exploration of general themes and concepts.

WHAT IS A “REMIX”?
Remix culture allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new creative work or product. The best examples of this kind of creative work are often marked by a reframing of the original narrative, and so produce a fresh perspective on both the source material and the context in which it first existed. Remixing, as a cultural practice has origins in hip hop through DJing or the live rearranging of pre-recorded music material to new compositions, and sampling or taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a sound recording in a different song.

Drawing a Sierpinski Triangle with Scratch.

Drawing a Sierpinski Triangle with Scratch.

MIT Media Lab’s Scratch programming platform let users remix blocks of code to create their own interactive stories, games and animations. Scratching is a technique used by DJs to remix music and produce different sound effects by manipulating vinyl records on a turntable. Scratch programming takes its name from this technique, as it lets users mix together different media in creative ways. We can use methods such as remixing, sampling, and scratching when developing lessons across academic subjects.

Using the novel “A Wrinkle in Time” and other books is a great way to connect literature to STEM subjects and digital fabrication. By reading stories or books we can identify themes that cross over into other areas. “A Wrinkle in Time” provides a base for creating innovative digital fabrication projects. The next steps include remixing relevant concepts and themes using vector shapes, vector editing software and laser cutting.

Remixing GeoConstructix: A Beginning

Kimberly Stanley (STEM CHAT) had new ideas for English/ELA. As someone who has been trying to implement Digital Fabrication into her classroom, this lesson really helped her see how this can happen without causing someone a tremendous amount of stress! Not only did she see the connection with “A Wrinkle in Time”, she also saw this as an opportunity to utilize this same lesson with almost any novel/short story and the artifact could represent a time machine or portal to another world. Her students could then design their artifact to represent the time period or world they would be entering. Kimberly also saw multiple writing opportunities for the students as they collaborated with others to complete this project.

Photos © Stan Rowin stanstudio.com

Photos © Stan Rowin stanstudio.com

Zachary Wenz (MC2), made some connections to what he is teaching, specifically using right triangles and trigonometry (Geometry). In the design of time portals students could prove theorems about triangles to including exploring how a line parallel to one side of a triangle divides the other two proportionally, and conversely; the Pythagorean Theorem proves the use of triangle similarity.

Students can use the properties of similarity transformations to establish the criterion for two triangles to be similar.

Students can use the properties of similarity transformations to establish the criterion for two triangles to be similar.

By the end of the GeoConstructix lesson, students will have learned the fundamentals of geometry and fabrication techniques with increasing levels of complexity. Students will use properties of similarity transformations and solve theorems and work out equations related to vector shapes such as triangles. In addition to geometric principles, we discussed tensegrity, specifically as a way to compress and expand a triangle or fractal-based structure to illustrate “wrinkling time.”

Students can solve theorems and work out equations related to triangles.

Students can solve theorems and work out equations related to triangles.

Creating triangles using vector editing software.

Creating triangles using vector editing software.

Based on Zach’s suggestions our group created dozens of right and equilateral triangles using a vector graphics software with the aim of laser cutting them to create a fractal-based time portal. Vector programs such as Inkscape or Illustrator allows users to compose and edit vector graphics images and save them in one of many vector graphics formats, such as EPS, PDF, WMF, SVG, or VML.

LASER CUTTING THE VECTOR SHAPES

Once the right and equilateral triangles were drawn in Illustrator, we used the correct specifications to prepare the file for laser cutting (ex. stroke/line .001 thickness). A typical commercial laser for cutting materials involves a control system (software) to generate the pattern to be cut from the material. In our case, we used a cardboard sheet. The focused laser beam is directed at the cardboard, which then burns away the lines, leaving straight edges.

Photos © Stan Rowin stanstudio.com.

Photos © Stan Rowin stanstudio.com.

Wrinkling Time in Real Time

Madeline L’Engle, author of “A Wrinkle in Time,” studied Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In the book, L’Engle gives readers a peak at time travel without the mind-boggling concepts of advanced math. The 2018 film will likely give teachers and students new ideas for exploration. In addition to reading the book, or watching the film teachers can use GeoConstructix. Further, to understand “wrinkling time” teachers can instruct students to use their time portals to imagine the present at one end and the future at the other. By compressing or pressing down the structure the present touches the future creating a fifth dimension, or a tesseract, as it is referred to in L’Engle’s book, as a wrinkle in time in real time.

Fractal-based time portal made up of triangles

Fractal-based time portal made up of triangles

To summarize, GeoConstructix can be used to build geometric paper or cardboard time portals. As we explored in our group. this project can be used as a tool to help students read and learn the fundamentals of geometry and science. Students can build on this project to explore more esoteric concepts such as tensegrity and time travel. Although our team ran out of time before we could construct our own fractal-based time portal we did talk about ways in which students might construct one using these cross-cutting concepts.

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December 5, 2017

A Wrinkle in Time: STEM & Digital Fabrication in Popular Culture

Nettrice Gaskins Leadership Cohort

“A Wrinkle in Time” is an upcoming American science fantasy adventure film directed by Ava DuVernay from a screenplay written by Jennifer Lee, and based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Madeleine L’Engle. Several concepts from the book and film connect to STEM subjects, even digital fabrication practices.

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