Summary

Here is the full slide deck from my presentation.

There were a few things that were important to me with respect to the students’ experience when coming up with this project.

• Civic Engagement

• Collaboration

• Chicago / city pride

• Students learning about people outside of their communities

• A shared vision

• Creative input

• Student agency

• Applied digital design and fabrication skills

Topics

• Collaborative problem solving

• Project Management

• Creativity with constraints

• Designing for digital fabrication

• Application and importance of prototyping and planning

• The iterative / design process

Standards

• 3A-AP-13: Create prototypes that use algorithms to solve computational problems by leveraging prior student knowledge and personal interests.

• 3A-AP-18: Create artifacts by using procedures within a program, combinations of data and procedures, or independent but interrelated programs.

Audience

• This project was done with high school students, however it could be easily adapted to middle school and even elementary school students.

Difficulty

• The difficulty of this project scales with the scope. How you choose to implement the project and therefore the scope and scale of the project depend on the resources available. In the implementation I presented, we were able to use a "full" makerspace including vinyl cutters, 3D carvers, laser engravers / cutters, and 3D printers. As intimidating as that may sound, it is absolutely possible to do this project with few digital fabrication tools or with more computing tools (such as Microbits, arduinos, etc).

Strengths

• Teaches aspects of iteration, problem solving, using technology in unexpected ways, and weaves in civic engagement and agency.

Weaknesses

• The project relies quite a bit on having digital fabrication tools, however with a little creativity, this project could be adapted to be done without those tools. It would however be more difficult to integrate CS concepts unless the topic of the project were modified (which I recommend anyway since this was a very "Chicago" topic). I encourage anyone giving this a shot to find meaning and motivation from the communities of the students.

Variations

• "What if I don't have a big makerspace?" Good question, there are lots of opportunities to weave in the civic / community engagement with more standard CS content. Someone suggested possibly using a map of the area, then making it so that if a user clicked on an neighborhood / area of the map, it would bring the user to a Scratch program (or webpage or any other kind of digital content) with a project related to that area.

• To bring more standard CS content in one could also use microcontrollers like Arduinos or Microbits and have a physical computing component added in.

• Use tools that 3D model solids with coding like OpenSCAD, or implement model analysis, or parametric modeling.