DOIT - Success Stories

--- title: DOIT - Success Stories description: Social media Autors: Santi Fuentemilla, Xavi Dominguez --- ###### categories: `Digital Fabrication` `evaluation` ###### tags: `DOIT` `FLU` `Future Learning Unit` `Teachers Trainings` [TOC] # Success Stories ## Ambaixadors/es Makers ### What does it take for a whole lot of brilliant children to excel? The seeds for the Ambaixadors/es Makers (“Maker Ambassadors”) project, #AmbMakers for short (which incidentally means “With Makers” in Catalan), were planted in a chance encounter when a member of the Fab Lab Barcelona met with a member of the Pere Tarrés Foundation. They quickly laid out a plan for a new collaboration, and the Barcelona City Council was happy to give their support. The focus of the project was to provide resources to children in maybe less than ideal situations. The Pere Tarrés already does amazing social work with children and families in general, and Fab Lab Barcelona is a buzzing hub for innovation and research on digital technologies for fabrication. For the scope of this project, the two leading institutions decided to work in three social centers in different neighborhoods of Barcelona: Poblenou, Poble-sec and Ciutat Vella. The social centers were already working with children under state protection, children from disadvantaged families, children with social issues and children from immigrant families who all sometimes need a little boost to fully become the best version of themselves, like all of us do at times. The Maker Ambassadors involved in the project were very young, from 10 to 14, and for most of them it was the first introduction to maker technology. For this reason, several workshops were organized in all three centers to teach the children the basics of what resources there were at their disposal, which machines could do what, and the general scope of what could be done. One great point paid special attention to was that the Pere Tarrés’ own facilitators also received training by the Fab Lab Barcelona team to better grasp the wide array of possibility they could guide their participants in, both in the scope of this project and in the future. All Maker Ambassadors learned to work on laser cutters, vinyl cutters, screen printing, 3D printing and electronics/robotics. They settled in groups according to what they wanted to pursue further, where one group chose to build their own 3D printer from a kit, which goes beyond mere assembly and requires an understanding of how machines work in general and how 3D printers work in particular, another decided to focus on electronics, and started to work with the Crocopoi, a platform developed in Fab Lab Barcelona. They later built robo-pets using the BBC’s Micro:bit, and continued with various projects. During the training phase they did guided projects, but the good part was what came after: Facilitators and participants held a brainstorming session, called a “dynamic”, and several socially-minded projects came about. One group decided to create “chemo-boxes”, 3D printed coverings for the chemotherapy equipment used for children. They helped in creating a story with the children receiving the treatment to imagine being given superpowers and become heroes. Another group designed toys for sick children that would accompany them in the hospital. For these projects they worked with Sant Pau Children’s Hospital. Now the project is officially concluded, but the children have been provided with the information and the social centers with equipment they can use, so the Maker Ambassadors can use their knowledge to teach new children, and they can all use the mini-lab they have to further implement projects for change. In the course of ten months, the participants learned a lot about more options for their future, but one of the most important aspects was that they learned to cooperate and think of others. We see great social change coming from the grassroots, with more and more Maker Ambassadors willing to share knowledge and act together every day. https://criatures.ara.cat/adolescencia/ambaixadors-maker-acostar-noves-tecnologies-infancia-en-risc_0_2072192776.html https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/es/blog/el-fablab-barcelona-y-la-fundacion-pere-tarres-inician-las-sesiones-del-proyecto-embajadoras-y ## DOIT - Pilot 1 and 2 ### Drop by drop, or pouring it all out: What’s the better approach? As part of Fab Lab Barcelona’s contribution, we implemented two pilots in the second year of the DOIT project. We used two distinct approaches in the implementation: Weekly sessions of one or two hours, or one several days long session to go from start to finish. We worked with a total of 60 middle school children aged 10 to 14 in Mataró and Badalona, two neighbors of Barcelona. With students from Mataró we held a 2.5 day-long session in the Green Lab in Valldaura, located in the middle of the Collserola National Park, and with Badalona we incorporated the weekly sessions into an elective entrepreneurship class offered by the school we worked with. With our long session pilot, we worked on creating a self-sufficient habitat and designing a Smart Garden together with students from the Escola GEM in Valldaura. The students attended presentations on what technology we had available, experimented with various materials and resources, and designed a prototype that they later presented. The weekly sessions were held from October to January. There were definitely advantages to seeing the same children week after week, but this approach did also have its challenges. Time management becomes crucial, as does an ability to create interest before anybody can really see where the journey will take them. At first there were some participants with less than enthusiastic attitudes, probably because all the things that excite so many of us about digital fabrication are quite abstract, but everything changed when the class visited Fab Lab Barcelona and saw for themselves some examples of what they could do. It just goes to show, you could have the most fascinating space, but something still has to click to turn “OK fine, more homework…” into “Wow, I can actually do some things here!” Luckily, these bits and atoms did click and the students were divided into groups, each tackling a different task. They proposed an issue, carried out interviews and tests to see if it actually was an issue, decided on how to approach the issue and then to develop a solution. One of the groups chose to work on a homework-meter after interviewing the rest of the school. The physical prototype they developed visualizes the amount of homework assigned in each class, and has feedback mechanisms for when it gets too much. There were a lot of motors and sensors involved in this beautiful machine. Another group thought there were too many birds on the rooftop garden the students use during recess. The birds made it unsafe for them to play as they liked, and nobody was happy about it. After thinking long and hard to find a solution that doesn’t harm the birds, they came up with a tech-y scarecrow that uses a combination of active and passive non-invasive techniques used to keep birds away, like noise, movement and reflective materials. There was one group who used a prized project developed in Fab Lab Barcelona. Some classrooms in the school were always too noisy, because the school itself is close to a noisy street. Using the Smart Citizen kit, they recorded and visualized the noise levels and presented their findings to the City Council, who later decided to replace buses that pass near the school with electric buses, which helped keep the noise levels down. Talk about civic engagement and affecting change! Both pilots had a lot to teach us. We are maybe slightly more partial to the shorter engagement over a longer period, but there are definitely advantages to a longer single session. Starting in September there will be more pilots happening in Fab Lab Barcelona, using new approaches, and we hope they will be as successful as the first two! ## Phablabs 4.0 ### Turn up the light: Integrating photonics in Fab Labs Do you know how light works? Phablabbers do! The Phablabs 4.0 project was devised to facilitate integration of photonics in the European maker ecosystem, through a partnership by photonics institutes and fab labs. Fab Lab Barcelona’s direct partner was ICFO, the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels, Barcelona, as well as the Tinkerers Fab Lab (also in Castelldefels). Together we developed and implemented a series of workshops and contributed to the photonics toolkit in the span of one year. One of the first workshops held in Fab Lab Barcelona was a flashlight challenge. As a start, participants were to understand how turning concepts into products works, and they started with putting together the flashlights from pre-designed parts that were either purchased or fabricated beforehand in the lab. To add their own flare, they used vinyl cutting techniques to make their own masks for the light - like a “Bat Signal”. The second challenge was to take this further: How can we use different properties of light to iterate another object? The answer was to create lenses to concentrate the light. The participants fabricated their own lenses from fairly common materials, and ended up with a torch that could produce a linear beam of light. They made some beautiful light paintings and used the linear torches as part of an interactive installation, but the question was still there: What’s next? What’s more? They realized that the line of light produced by the torch looked similar to the laser beam used in some 3D scanners, so was it possible to make a 3D scanner with this little flashlight? With support from the Fab Lab Barcelona/Future Learning Unit team, they ended up designing a 3D scanner that, yes, in fact did work like a laser scanner, albeit with certain limitations. The fruits of the workshops were widely shared with the general public in Barcelona’s Science Festival and Maker Faire in the summer. The project was also presented during the annual conference held by the Fab Lab Network in Toulouse, France. When everybody returned from the summer holidays, the project continued with further workshops and challenges held in Barcelona and Castelldefels. More active components and electronics were included, and projects such as a sun tracker and heart rate monitor were developed in Fab Lab Barcelona. Participants also made a 3-part color mixer and some funky art using polarisation filters. There were competitions on who could finish a laser labyrinth faster, after the labyrinth was fabricated and put together of course. More workshops are to follow, but Fab Lab Barcelona has already met and worked with 300 young makers in total aged 10 to 14 in this one year. A great contribution was made to the arsenal of tools for physics education, together with all the contributing labs. Including actual students in the development of methodologies allowed us as educators to discover how to create better engagement and end up with tools that really work. We are excited to see what more we can all learn in the future, now that everybody is a bit better prepared. ## Joan Robots ### Beauty in the discarded: Robots out of the trash Among his many great qualities, the Hidalgo family can also boast a very small recycling bag - not because they don’t recycle, but because somebody in the family uses the “trash” people throw away in a unique and beautiful way. When Joan Hidalgo was 4, he was diagnosed with Ataxia-Telangiectasia (A-T), a neurodegenerative disease with symptoms similar to Cerebral Palsy. Due to this very rare condition (a total of 35 people have been diagnosed with A-T in all of Spain), Joan has a little bit more free time on his hands than his peers, which he has put to good (great!) use. This brilliant young man takes “trash” and turns them into adorable robot toys with a retro flair to draw attention to the waste we create. His father helps him collect bottle caps, soda cans, packaging, tins and a million other knick knacks as well as some vintage-looking circuit boards from broken electronics. Joan has been making robots for 3 years now, since he was 14. He says he was inspired by Star Wars, and it’s easy to see some parallels: A young boy with some limitations in life making robots in a sunny city, but in Sant Cugat del Vallès everybody stays on the light side. The robot creations with a serious case of 60s tin toy vibes are being sold in Itinerarium Foundation’s website as part of their ongoing collaboration. All proceeds go to Joan and his family, and Joan sometimes holds workshops to teach others to view “trash” in a different way. Here’s where Fab Lab Barcelona comes in: Itinerarium Foundation contacted us and we started talking about how we could support Joan and his creations. He’s very good at making figurines, but he wants to push it further. He wants his robots to move, to make sounds, to light up - be more robot-y - and that’s something we are good at, so it only makes sense for us to team up. In our collaboration, the Future Learning Unit team in Fab Lab Barcelona held several meetings and discussed what could be added to the robots. Does a robot need a “jet pack”? We can do that, sure, with a couple of LEDs there’s no limit! How about a robot that speaks? Can we replace the decorative circuit boards with functional ones? Why not! Can the robots move? How could they afford not to, when it’s so easy to make them! Joan’s is a great story of following through with what you’re passionate about, while being aware of (but not weighed down by) one’s circumstances. We should all do as much as we can for what we want in life, and ask for help when we need it - there’s always somebody to offer it. ## Pilot 3 - Feeling our environment (icecreem) https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPocrRnjL2igDX7EwSyjwjQpqNU03J9QBLV_ObPBrHfmmoL4FnqRzoVZq6KIG8z2A?key=OGdrR0lMR0tKdFRUY1FBRUhsWTlGLS1WeWdaZ0F3 ## Phablabs4.0 - Challenge - Drone Niara https://www.goteo.org/project/drone-niara https://droneniara.wixsite.com/home https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPt77lctKl0kSRMW6mH6njhIzAhsG56SU3BRx5PpsBjnbq17xJwXQs_crtN88JPig?key=cE9RQXRfbGdmbGh3VlNOTzNSWHBWdVhrTFZYMFFB ## Phablabs4.0 - Challenge - Smart taula https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPt77lctKl0kSRMW6mH6njhIzAhsG56SU3BRx5PpsBjnbq17xJwXQs_crtN88JPig?key=cE9RQXRfbGdmbGh3VlNOTzNSWHBWdVhrTFZYMFFB ## Superheroes https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMIljelQ-ViHhJ6y3VzxNdZlSV_K2rqXgpR14ZgiYo1b4AO5P0fubAfpNXmHRxJmA?key=anprdlp0T0lvUjdkcWYwX3lrVHE4SXFZVFFmVHJn ## Maker Faire (bioplastics) https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMIljelQ-ViHhJ6y3VzxNdZlSV_K2rqXgpR14ZgiYo1b4AO5P0fubAfpNXmHRxJmA?key=anprdlp0T0lvUjdkcWYwX3lrVHE4SXFZVFFmVHJn ## Learning Dimentions for social entrepenurail skills - AI Leraning dimentionswith photos - Encuesta ## Training trainers (Redbull) https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipM8J_IIKDKjJSOYTD_PV0dpSvDIo_0K33YQCclXdIxXm34jx1oyZBNqaX7lQEGd8Q?key=NW01cjMxVElMRnk1ZzZuRXAwVFl5ZDZvZkJHVWFB