Digital Fabrication Workshops for Teens

A collection of projects i created to teach digital fabrication to children and young adults

The following are a few projects i taught in the form of workshops to children and young adults to teach the basics of CAD design, 3D printing, Laser cutting and digital fabrication.

1) Cad design and 3D printing of easter bunnies

  • In this workshop children are taught the basic of 3D Cad design using the software Tinkercad i.e. a basic boolean shape based CAD program
  • The finished object is then printed on FDM 3D printers

2) 2D graphic design and laser cutting

  • In this workshop students draw a design on paper and then take a picture of it with a smartphone camera
  • The picture is then imported into an open source graphic design software like Inkscape whereby it is vectorized
  • The finished graphic is exported as an SVG and engraved and cut out using 3mm MDF on a laser cutter

3) Electronics and Laser cutting

  • In this project a LED lit acrylic panel is built
  • The enclosure is cut out from 3mm MDF panels on a laser cutter which are put together with hot glue
  • a RGB led strip is soldered to an LED controller and installed into the enclosure
  • a custom graphic designed on a 2D graphics program like Inkscape is lasered on the acrylic sheet with a laser cutter

4) Arduino obstacle avoiding robot car

  • In this project a simple arduino controlled robot car is built
  • 2 servo motors are used with the third wheel being a castor wheel
  • A xxxx motor driver is used to control the speed and direction of the two motors
  • An ultrasonic sensor senses obstacles in front of the car and moves the car to avoid it
  • The car is powered by a 9V battery
  • In the workshop students learn basic electronics, arduino programming and laser cutting.