Week Eleven Assignment

2/1

      This is what came out of my mind when I played with models in Tinkercat. I found there was a category of skeleton so I tried to put the different pieces together. The process took longer than my expectation and I did enjoy what I got from there. This human skeleton has 14 pieces and they have already had their name to show where they are supposed to be in the human scale. However, putting them together is not an easy deal - aligning them in the same height and adjusting different parts to different angle demand time and patience. And of course, I need to have a plan of how the skeleton pose before I started to attach pieces together, otherwise I have to adjust all the parts to fit in the gesture. Anyway the process is fun, even though a little bit exhausting, and the final outcome looks good.

2/2 ideas of 3 dice!

I need to say a BIG "thank you" to Richard and Jackie!!! The three dices I have is

Creative coding

 Body

Drawing

So my initial idea is using scratch (easy to show the code visually) to show the human body parts. How to show the "drawing body" process?

What I can imagine is puzzles. I can make a puzzle game to make user control the cat to flip over puzzles to complete the human body (for example) in order to show the drawing body process. The technical function requiring in this project is click function, hover function and image src changing function - which I learned before. So I think the puzzle idea is doable.

Learning goals:

1.learn different body parts

2.Learn the name of body parts

Week Ten Assignment 2/2

Comments:

Danielle (3D paper doll)
Darien (Video project)
Grace (stop motion animation)
Ren (Scanography)
Yiting (Laser cutting)
Sarah (video project)
Quinta (laser cutting)

Week Ten Assignments1/2

Design Process:

I teamed up with Annie and we decided to make wood 3D puzzles in animal figure (as shown in the following pictures as example)

We planned that Annie and I would each make two animals. Annie chose seal and lion and I chose raccoon and cat.

Firstly, we started from 2D design. I found a cute raccoon image and a cat image on canva.com and purchased them to do the template.

As a 3D design, I want them to stand up with a supporter that has a hole to attach to the body part. Therefore I copy the back feet part of the body and add a slot on it.

Then I was stuck by a question that how should I make a slot on the feet part to make the body "stand up" - how wide the slot is and where should it be?

Then I met up with Annie on Tuesday after in Things space and tried to figure out the width of the slot. After several try out, we finally got the width of 3.225mm, a number that can help the supporter hold the body (but not that tightly, we still need glue to hold them together).

As a real beginner to Ai and laser cut, I had no idea to what should I do to prepare the design. Annie told me I first need to prepare the engraving, which is making animals into greyscale. I found a quick website that can complete greyscale in 1s. (https://pinetools.com/grayscale-image)

Then in order to make sure the animal can be cut out, I need to draw the black outline of the cartoon character with 0.01 stroke. I tried so many brushes and pens to make the outline tidy and clean and finally I figured out how to use pen in Ai. The process is exhausting TOT

Annie successfully cut out her seal with ball, but unfortunately we do not have enough time for cutting all the animal. We would continue the work at Wednesday evening and bring what we have to the class. 

Update 11/14:

We made it this afternoon!!!

One thing we messed up a little bit is we made the slot too tiny to hold the body. Instead of repeating doing the body part, we tried to use sand paper to rub the slot to be a bit bigger. After a couple of minutes rubbing, sand paper worked and the slots were big enough to hold the body part.

The process is fun, even though it also took us sanity. There is always something unexpected happen, like the wood width is different from piece to piece that we need to calculate all the time, and the old version Ai in the lab sometimes did not work as the way new version did (not complaining). Anyway, the important thing is we learned a lot from this laser-cutting experience - about how to manipulate Ai and the machine and how to learn something I am not familiar with. 

Week Assignment Nine

1/2: I created a little interactive game that can collect scores when the cat touches the moving clouds.
Learning Goals for users: Counting and coordinate ability between eyes and hands that control the cat;
Learning Goals for producer: Getting familiar with motion blocks and variable blocks, and try to collect the score with the block as much as possible;

2/2:
My scratch experience: Actually I started to fiddle with Scratch after I learned how to  code in words. So understanding the function and possible function of each block is not difficult for me while what is important in this game is to create projects creatively with limited blocks and how to teach young learners to understand and practice with their own creativity. The key is see and giving them chances and rooms to tinker with themselves, from my experience. In this semester I started to teach Scratch lessons for elementary level kids and surprisingly found they are genius designers as long as they know how to put blocks of code together and understand their potential function. They can connects different blocks to see what happens next and try different colocation one more time, which is also really important in Scratch learning not only for kids but for everyone new to it.

1) Art Lessons: Scratch has pen blocks which can draw the track of the character moving. That pen blocks can be useful in art class for students can use the pen creatively and draw on stage as they do on canvas. Teachers can teach them the functions of each pen blocks and students can try out the diverse outcome of putting different blocks together. 

2) Art Lessons: Scratch allows different characters on one same stages simultaneously and in sequence - it depends on the set of time. Students can use different characters to play a little show with the block of saying and thinking. Under teachers guide of how to use the blocks, students can feel free to set up their stage, characters and scripts and put it on scratch.