This semester my Ithaca College students in Make Better Stuff Studio are collaborating with Wicked Device Electronics Co., the makers of Air Quality Egg–an affordable, web-connected air quality sensor made in Ithaca, NY–to design an exhibit for EdTech Day at IC. Make Better Stuff (MBS) Studio is a pilot course in IC’s Department of Environmental Science. In the course, students learn sustainable design principles and design methodology through hands-on projects.
Last week we had one of the egg’s inventors, Vic Aprea, visit our class and help us install an egg in the lab. The students enjoyed meeting Vic and gained a sense for what it takes to get a complex product like the egg up and running and collecting data.
The question I’m asking the students to consider for the exhibit is this: How might we inspire people to engage in air-quality monitoring and activism? The students have been brainstorming, paper-prototyping, and testing creative responses to this question. Their next step is to take their ideas from prototypes to reality. To help them, they will learn to use some new tools: a laser cutter and the arduino.
For laser cutting, we are visiting Elliot Wells, a member of the local makerspace Ithaca Generator, to learn how to create 3D objects with a combination of laser cutting and good old-fashioned wood glueing and clamping. Then next week I’ll introduce the class to arduino and we’ll program color-changing lights. The laser cutter and the arduino are the two dominant tools in a discrete “box of crayons” the students have to work with for the project. These “constraints” will help make the exhibit pieces from each of the six teams display as a cohesive whole. I’m excited to see what they do with these tools and how they respond to the challenge at hand.
