Our Creation Studio was buzzing this summer as STEM4Learning offered a day camp exploring 2D and 3D Design. We kicked off exploring a variety of ways you can create incredible things with a Cricut cutter. Water bottle vinyl stickers were our starting point but we quickly moved on to creating stencils that allowed us to etch designs into glass. Switching to pens let everyone print out a design that
once we had it perfect we could etch into a piece of acrylic. What do you do with an etched piece of acrylic? Well if you do a little woodworking with some saws and a CNC router you soon have a wooden base where you can embed an LED light strip and voila! - you have a supercool edgelit LED light.
From there it was time to explore our newest additions to our makerspace - new Prusa Mini+ 3D printers as well as our Glowforge Pro lasercutters. After learning the basics of tinkercad we were able to print out a few simple projects such as a personalized name keychain, some gears for a basic spirograph and some cool spinning tops. With the Glowforge we used both
powerpoint and tinkercad to learn the difference between a vector and raster image, using both to make some cedar coasters and personalized bedroom door signs. We packed a ton into those five days but sure seemed like everyone went home smiling and with a lot more knowledge of designing with STEM.
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