We are required to keep a journal on our learning experience. This is my first time to do it. But I find it interesting to draw on lab experiences to connect what I've learnt.
This week is about constructionism, I get to familiar with Mindstorms (1980), by Seymour Papert. It is detailed about his outlook on Piaget's theories about concrete and formal operational thinking. While in the lab session, we are required to design and build an Omni-Animal by using laser cutter to prototype two- and three-dimensional objects.
I chose the American Museum of Natutal History (AMNH) as a best place to observe, and the leatherback sea turtle caught my eyes. The most notable features of the turtle is the lack of a bony carapace and the turtle has 7 distinct ridges rise from the carapaca, crossing from the cranial to caudal margin of its back.
Starting with paper and cardboards, my first draft emphasized on the shell. However, I found it diffcult to bend.
So, I switched my idea in changing the vertical lines into horizontal, by which the structure is more stable and easy to copy. I was thinking about using lines to make to effect of 7 ridges, so I dragged several triangles in each cardboard to leave space for ropes.
After cutting my design, I started to use paint or craft materials found in the lab to augment the animal. We do have lots of materials, such as balloon, cloth, tapes. I want to show the audience the inner structure for some reason. However, my attempt in transparent tapes was a failure. Honestly, just like a mummy.
I laser cut the head and flippers. Instead of creating a plugin functions, I dug holes so flippers were movable just like a livable turtle.
Then, using the same methodology in scraping the skeleton, I laser cut the shell's structure.
Finally, in order to imitate the turtle's flippers, I randomly drew some shapes also using laser cut as well.
But there let one technical problems: it took Gloforge almost 20minutes to finish cutting, which is out of my expectation. Later I learnt that because the design of this machine is to regard each shape as an individual, while we still have another one, epilog, can cut cardboards line by line in a matrix. So I cut 4 flippers and a head with spiral when you thumbs up.
And finally, it's done.
It's nice to integrate science by doing observations in the animal's features to inform the design. With several iterations and it did become better and better each time, so that the patterns on the turtle turn out to be stunning and well designed.
