Mandarin | Karen Blumberg

Tag Archives: Mandarin

December 13, 2022 · 2:07 pm

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:

Wikipedia Shadow play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play
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

3D designing & printing Xingming Yin (personal name seals) in Class 8 Mandarin. @BrearleyNYC #MakerEd #NYCISTk6

I’m currently working with Yue Tang and Yusi Gao, Class VIII Mandarin teachers at The Brearley School, on a Xingming Yin (personal name seals) project. Historically and currently, a yin is a seal or stamp used to “prove identity on documents, contracts, art, or similar items where authorship is considered important.” After learning about Ian Klapper’s medieval seals and “moveable type” projects at Construct3D conference, I was inspired to suggest this to the Mandarin teachers.

Yue and Yusi allotted three class periods for students to design a seal in Tinkercad, print their stamp on our Makerbot printers, and try using the finished product. The steps involved are:

Create a hand-drawn design
Use Photoshop to isolate the ink
Flip the image horizontally
Export as JPG
Convert JPG to SVG (with online converter)
Import SVG to Tinkercad
Place SVG onto a box
3D print

Here are the slides I shared with the Brearley girls to help them navigate the Photoshop and Tinkercad steps at their own pace:

Today, I’m going to run to a stationery store to purchase sealing wax (which melts via an embedded wick like a candle) and wax glue sticks that can be heating through a glue gun. With better planning, I would have ordered these three items below via Amazon: