Notes from the Class XI Mandarin shadow puppet project at @BrearleyNYC. #STEAM #MakerEd

Yue Tang is one of my amazing colleagues at The Brearley School. After we installed a Glowforge lasercutter in the CoLaboratory, I approached her about doing a shadow puppet project with her Mandarin class. I’d watched puppet performances during some of my travels, and it seemed like it would be such a fun and creative project to put on a show at school. This year, we collaborated on shadow puppet shows in two different grade levels, Class VIII and Class IX!

Before embarking on the project, I showed Yue’s students examples of shadow play using the following two links:

1. Wikipedia Shadow play  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play
2. Three little pigs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCmFWJjc4RA

Separately, I had seen an ad to attend a Crankie Theater show in Coney Island. I wasn’t able to make the show, but I followed links to learn more about crankie theaters and located building plans to construct my own crankie theater. I loosely followed the plans shared on this site: http://www.thecrankiefactory.com/348971243. I also gleaned information from this blog post: http://williamtherebel.blogspot.com/2015/01/thoughts-on-making-crankie-box.html (Note the image in the gallery above showing a quick semicircular 3D piece that I designed and printed on one of our Ultimaker printers to hold the two main dowels upright in the puppet frame.)

Here is a snippet of the Class IX play: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fVEMs-ZR4UQwzQ2xwRcw0srMk6W80dUW/view?usp=share_link

Here is a snipped from the Class VIII project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jGsC9-tolFgJgyko23VlKmaBZRz4uj02/view?usp=sharing

Prototyping a wall mount for alligator clips to hang in the @BrearleyNYC #CoLab. #MakerEd @ultimaker @thingiverse @tinkercad

In the CoLaboratory, we have a large bin marked ALLIGATOR CLIPS that was becoming a bit of an organizational nightmare with 5th graders struggling to free a wire from a tangle of metal-tipped tumbleweeds. I figured a wall-mounted solution might be helpful, and I asked my 5th graders for their opinions and suggestions.

My first physical prototype was a scrap of cardboard affixed to the side of a shelving unit with a large binder clip. Then, I mocked up a simple comb-inspired design with Tinkercad and later added perpendicular bits to the edges of the tines (like a rake) to keep the wires from slipping out. I belatedly noticed we have alligator clips of different thicknesses, so I also made another version with wider spaces between the tines.

I posted the STL files to the Thingiverse here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5547674