Triple Helix

The student project for the spring semester of 2013 was to learn about African hexastrip weaving to model buckyball molecules. I followed the outline here:

http://csdt.rpi.edu/african/hex/intro.html

First, the students created small buckyballs that they could hold in their hand. With this, we talked about the 60 degree angles at each turn, and how Africans use this concept to uniformly make baskets and other weaves. I also brought a African ball woven from wood that Ron Eglash gave me to further explain how useful this technique is in Africa. At each intersection, a hexagon is formed, and each “hole” in the ball is a pentagon. We worked on this project over a couple of days, and as different students began to show up, I had the previous students become the teachers for the newer students.

Next, I printed the buckyball strips on a 36″ X 42″ poster so the students could make a really large buckyball. Once I brought this into the classroom, we had the idea of creating three types of buckyballs. The first one that fit in the students’ hands, the large one on the poster, and then a medium one so we could put all of them inside of each other.

Hackett After School with Terry Bennett and Libby Rodriguez

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So these past few weeks I have been going to Hackett Middle School twice a week to host an after school session to get the kids acquainted with the skateboarder CSDT. It’s been going well. I’ve mainly just tried to let the kids play around on it so that they come across things they don’t understand and then I can explain things to them.

This week I wanted to try something different, however. I borrowed a group of students’ past project from Ron Eglash called the Fast Track. It’s a hot wheels track wired with an arduino and four sensors and measures the speed a car takes to finish the track (http://pdi-studio5.wp.rpi.edu/fast-track/). I put the opensource code onto my laptop and took the track to the school today. Through this project, the kids learned about speed (being equal to distance over time) and about how gravity and mass help to increase speed. It was a success as there was 100% participation and the competition really excited them. Through our talks about speed, they learned ways to increase speed without changing the track (i.e. taping weights to their cars). But this could also be a negative if the weight is too great, so they had to find that perfect balance.

A cool thing I noticed also was that we encountered other interesting aspects to explain to the students through this exercise as we ended up talking about wind resistance and extraneous data. My main goal in this project, however, was to give them a physical way to think of the skateboarder CSDT. We talked about how they could increase the mass in the CSDT as well as changing the angles of the arcs and line segments to increase gravity. So my plan was to get kids excited about the project using toys and to help them understand real world applications for the CSDT. So I can reference that next week when we go back to working with skateboarder.