Soldering Kits

I've been lurking around various electronic sites and have found alternatives to the kit you  get with Make: Electronics through MakerShed.   (Shown to the left) If you bought the kit alone without the book, it would cost a $114.

Here are a couple of different choices.

Spark Electronics
Tool Kit - Intermediate
$69.95

I like this one because it has a Third hand with a magnifier and a nicer set of wire strippers.  Both items I bought shortly after starting this whole electronics thing.

I'm thinking for the $30 you save, you could buy the spools of wire, a set of screwdrivers and a Panvise and still come in around $100.

They also had two other packages available. One cheaper.  One more expensive.

Adafruit Industries
Ladyada's Electronic Toolkit
$100

 This setup is very similar to the MakerShed kit.  Has a small breadboard and parts to build a power supply.  Doesn't have the screwdrivers and Maker's log.  It's $14 cheaper.

(Note: The multimeter shown here is not the one that comes with the kit)



I saw lots of kits that included a soldering iron and minimal tools in the 15-25 dollar range.  I tried to find a list somewhere of the essential tools every beginner should have, but to no avail.  If anyone has a link to such an animal, let me know. Or links to other beginners start-up kits.

[Image: MakerShed Kit: Captured from Makershedsite: http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKEE1]

[Image: Spark Kit: Captured from Spark site: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9466]

Pumpkin Saw

My wife bought one of those pumpkin carving kits with cutting blades included. Everytime I use the plastic handled tools, I usually say something along the lines of, "Next year, I will make my own saws. These things are awful."

But I never do. I'm a big Halloween talker. But, I'm all talk and no-do.

Saw this post on Make and am now thinking I could whip up a simple pumpkin saw with just a scroll saw blade laying around in my garage and some duct tape. Minimalist. Workable. Better than the plastic junk that hurts my delicate fingers.

Next year I will be ready!

[via Make]

[Image captured from Make: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/10/quick_and_easy_pumpkin_cutter.html]

Compressed Air Fire Starter

This Maker Faire project facinates me. I had never heard of a "fire piston" before. A device which uses the rapid compression of air to create fire. A device which is based on a tool used by indigenous people in Malaysia and elsewhere. It was introduced into Europe in the early 1800's and was a common household item until the match became widely available.

Watch the video to see how you can make your own.



As a former social studies teacher, I wondered how I had never heard of this device before. I went out and bought a flint to try mimic early mountain men. (A success). I also tried to build a fire-bow once. (Not so successful). So I went on line and did a little research. Turns out there are lots of videos an info out there on the subject. Here are a few if you are curious.

Detailed article about the fire piston. And of course a link to wikipedia.

This little video is a quick demo from a site where a guy makes them out of Buffalo horn and bamboo.

Another video of a traditional Malaysia fire piston. This one also uses materials that could be found in the wild including a strand of thread as the seal. I read somewhere in my browsing that the natives could also use saliva to wet the thread around the piston. (When I first watched this, I thought it might be a hassle to find water to soak the thread.)

If you are a teacher, this could be an engaging activity for students. I am thinking it might be fun to look at some of the different ways man has been able to create fire and let the kids try a few. Children and fire....sounds like a winner to me!

[via Make] [Image captured from Make: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/07/weekend_project_fire_piston.html]

Fireworks Tutorials

I've decided to use Adobe Fireworks as the graphics editor of choice in my classes. I've always been a fan of Photoshop and have used it for years. This semester I am teaching in a lab that doesn't have Photoshop installed. The cost of outfitting the machines with a program that will only be used this one semester is prohibitive. We do have Fireworks in the lab. In fact, we have a site license for the entire school. I was going to just use Fireworks in my one class and Photoshop in my others when I decided to go all out and teach it in all my web classes because:

• It is available on every computer
• It edits both vector and raster graphics
• Doing certain tasks are easier in Fireworks than Photoshop (less steep of a learning curve).
• If kids are into the graphics they can always move on to explore Photoshop or Illustrator.

The problem. I am not as adept at using Fireworks. So, what's a geek like me to do? I immediately started looking for tutorials online. I've found some good ones and I plan on sharing some of the better sites I find here. The first being a site put up by Joyce Evans who has written several how-to-books on Fireworks and Dreamweaver. She offers up a lot of video tutorials which are simple to follow and descriptions of books and DVDs you can purchase.

I've found the online video tutorials to be simple and easy to follow. I've gotten several lesson ideas already. Someday, I'd like to have a series of videos similar to this available for my students who miss a class or just don't get it the first time. Until then, I may point them to these easy to use clips. (Have to check to see if it's blocked by my district first.)

[Image captured from Adobe web site]

On Screen Timer

Sometimes you just want a timer and you can't find a watch with a second hand. Sometimes you are giving your students a timed exercise or quiz and you want a visual to remind the kids of how much time they have left. Sometimes you want to countdown the seconds until you can run out of the building screaming.

Our school librarian sent out this link the other day for a simple online stopwatch. I've already used it twice. The timer shown above is a little countdown bomb. I'm sure the kids will never tire of hearing how they shouldn't "bomb this test."

[Image captured from http://www.online-stopwatch.com/]

Extreme Pumpkins

I love carving pumpkins for Halloween but I hate those little wimpy carving tools you can buy this time of year. I've often thought of rebuilding them using heftier parts from the metal-things-that-can-cut aisle of the hardware store. I was searching the net for someone who might already have done the initial design for sturdier carving tools when I discovered Extreme Pumpkins. Tom Nardone doesn't mess around. He went straight to the garage and pulled out the power tools. Why didn't I think of that?

The site has lots of helpful hints and ideas. There are a few patterns you can download. He has some patterns you can buy and links to the two books he's written on the subject. There is also some video, including the video of a pumpkin lit with a toilet paper roll soaked in kerosene that was making the rounds last year.

Lots of great examples of pumpkin carving here but be aware that there are some links to adult oriented products from this site. Plus there is the use of power tools, fire and extreme patterns. I wouldn't recommend opening this one up in your classroom or sending your students here. My guess is you'd have one of those uncomfortable meetings with your principal and a slightly charred set of parents that starts with, "Just what in Sam Hill are you teaching in that den of evil you call a classroom?"

If you do these kinds of activities with kids though, you will find lots of useful ideas you could safely share. I think I might lock up the power tools if I caught my 9 year old watching this on his own. (I have no nine year old....so I'm not too worried but my wife has hidden the kerosene for some reason!)

[Image was captured from http://www.extremepumpkins.com: It is a picture of a contestent for his annual pumpkin carving contest]

Thirty One Online Applications

Ran across this link to "The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education" on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… He has a list of thirty-one free online applications that could be used by your students and/or yourself. There is a brief write up on each application and I didn't see one that I'm not planning on checking out. I was going to write about a couple to fill out my weeks worth of posts but there is too much here to hoard. If you are like me and still trying to flesh out your lessons for this first semester, this might be the place to find an idea or two. Or just possibly thirty-one!

I often think that I am more aware than the average web-head of a lot that's available out there in cyberspace and then I find a resource like this where I discover I am just a babe in the woods playing with twigs while there are lumberjacks out there harvesting lodge pole pines. I may have to just send my wife packing so I can spend more time searching and surfing the internet. Or... I could keep the wife, learn to be satisfied gathering sticks and just add this blog to my RSS feed?

Image: Flickr: "She's Leaving Home": Uploaded on August 7, 2006 by Thomas Hawk: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/208990544/((CC)Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic)

Acid Test for Browsers

The Acid3 test page will check to see how compliant a browser is to web standards. If you are teaching web design, your students will eventually run into a situation where a page will open fine on one browser but will not look right on another. The Acid3 test is a fast way to show your kids these differences graphically. The picture shown here is what the page is supposed to look like. My understanding is that at this point no browser is 100% compliant. Try it with your current browser and see how close it comes.

If you want more details about the organization that put the test together or the whole issue of web standards, check out the Web Standards Project site.

[Image captured from ACid3 Test reference page: http://acid3.acidtests.org/reference.html]

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

Shop classes are slowly disappearing. The last middle level shop class went away from our district a couple of years ago. High school shop type classes only happen at our vocational school. When I was hired to teach a middle level technology class in 1998 it was because they canceled the plans for a wood shop as no one applied for the open position. After deciding not to re-post the position, my principal changed the wood shop into a technology lab.

Even though I got a great job because of this, I think overall this is a bad trend. Kids need a place where they can build things. A place where they can cut and drill and hammer. It's part of how we learn to interact with the world. My teaching partner and I noticed that over the 7 years we taught the technology class, each year, the kids ability to manipulate tools and materials seemed to decrease.

With that said, it should come as no surprise that I enjoyed the following TED Talk, 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do by Gever Tully.





[Image: Grabbed from an article about the Tinkering School on Makezine: http://www.makezine.com/pub/ev/347]

3D Printer

Several years ago I was touring our local vocational school with a group of technology teachers. The one thing that jumped out and had me talking and dreaming for days was the 3D Printer. The thing was expensive. They had written a grant and I think the assistant principal had to sell his liver in order to raise the money. But it definitely was cool.

If you don't know, a 3D printer is a machine that creates a 3D object. It's print head is able to move in 3 directions, side to side plus up and down. Any object can be thought of as being made up of many, many thin layers. A 3D printer prints each of those layers one at a time from the bottom of the object to the top. Of course, it isn't using ink but rather some material that can be extruded in a liquid form that quickly hardens. The one I saw used a type of plastic.

Think of a brick house. You lay the first row of bricks around the foundation. Then you add row after row of bricks until you finally have a house. If your bricklayer were a 3D printer, then each layer of bricks would be one pass of the printer head. Still not clear? Don't worry, lots of folks have a hard time getting their head around this one. I think the big problem is calling them 3D printers. They should have borrowed the name from Star Trek and called them replicators! Watch the movie and hopefully it will make more sense.

Hod Lipson and Evan Malone at Cornell University have developed a 3D printer that you can build, if you are handy, for around $2400. It's open source and the plans are free. Their hope is to get a lot of people working on this project and get the price down and the quality up. Imagine if you will, anything you can design in a CAD program could be reproduced as a 3D object.



NewScientistTech Article: "Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution"

Popular Mechanics Article: "Fab at Home, Open-Source 3D Printer, Lets Users Make Anything". There is better video at this site.

[Image: (Hod Lipson / Evan Malone) from"Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution." NewScientistTech. 09 Jan 2007. NewScientistTech. 26 Oct 2007 .]

My Walk Score...Stinks!

My friends and I have been playing around with this neat little web site that determines a "walk score" for your home. Enter in your address and it will create a map centered around your house. All the amenities you can walk to are shown as little icons, such as restaurants, schools, coffee shops and parks.

It is an interesting filter to use in studying where you live. I already knew my score was going to be low as I've been complaining about the walk-ability of my neighborhood since I moved here. Now I have a little map and a score of 29 (out of a 100) to show that it's just not my imagination. If I wanted easy access to schools, I would be living in the right place. If I wanted music and entertainment. Not so much.



This could be a jumping off point for a geography class in talking about place. A science class talking about environmental neighborhood design. A husband talking about moving someplace where I, ...er he, can walk to get a cup of coffee!

[Images: "Walk Score." Walk Score. Front Seat Management. 3 Oct 2007 .]

TechShop

Every time my school had an open house, the comment I got from parents who were touring the technology lab was never,

"Mr. G, you are so good looking for a man your age. What is your secret?"

It was always,

"I wish I could take this class. I'd like to just come here, hang out and mess around with all this stuff!"

A place called TechShop has opened in California that offers just such a place. Along with access to all thier neat equipment they also offer classes in case you don't know how to run a Desktop Milling Machine or are a little rusty on your welding. There are plans to keep the shop open 24 hours a day. Just imagine, a place where you could run your power tools and hammer metal at any time of the night without the neighbors taking up a petition for your immediate deportation to Iceland.

Guy Kawasaki has a long article on his blog, How to Change the World, about the TechShop and it's founder, Jim Newton.

["TechShop is the SF Bay Area's Only Open-Acess Public Workshop--Welcom." TechShop:Build Your Dreams Here. 2007. TechShop LLC. 12 Sep 2007 .]
[Image: Kawasaki, Guy. "How to Change the World: TechShop: Geek Heaven." How to Change the World. 2007. 12 Sep 2007 .]