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Mike and Ann Eisenberg have spent nearly a decade developing the HyperGami and JavaGami design environments for paper sculpture. Kids and adults customize three-dimensional polyhedra on-screen; the software generates a two-dimensional folding net which the user may decorate, print to a color printer, and then assemble into a real three-dimensional paper model. Using basic polyhedral building blocks and operations such as stretching, capping, truncation, and slicing, it is possible to build everything from hippos and penguins to ice cream cones, carnivorous plants, and bubble gum machines. Mike and Ann are especially interested in studying kids' spatial thinking and have an NSF ROLE (Research on Learning in Education) grant to extend HyperGami and JavaGami as tools to help students become sophisticated spatial reasoners. JavaGami 2.0 is released! JavaGami 2.0 is Windows and Mac compatible, with additional palettes of shapes (including Archimedean Duals and 20 Johnson Solids), texture fills, and an improved shape slicing interface.
Turtle Path Printer is an application in development for printing turtle paths in a tangible three-dimensional form. 
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CAD tools for Automata 
Software designed for children's uses lags far behind similar software for adults in many domains; CAD/CAM software is a particularly notable case. MachineShop is a first attempt at a sophisticated and rich tool with which children can design, fabricate, and construct the simple mechanisms that drive automata and mechanical toys. By combining a software design environment for the cams, gears, and cranks needed to build these objects with a computer-controlled laser cutter to fabricate them, we hope to open this domain to children. With this tool at our disposal, we can learn about the changes that take place in the mechanical reasoning and spatial cognition of children as they create, construct, and use their automata.
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Software for PopUp Paper Sculpture Pop-up cards and books are a fascinating window into three-dimensional thinking. We hold in our hands a two-dimensional page which when opened expands to become a three-dimensional picture. How can we make a tool to help children create pop-up cards and books for themselves? What problems do we have to solve, and what sort of interface challenges do we face? What if children could make their own moveable books and cards? What might they learn from the experience? How would this influence their ability to visualize in three dimensions? Even in this constrained set of pop-ups, the constructions consisting only of cuts and folds, there are many mathematical ideas which children can explore including recursion, fractals, symmetry, and angle equality. This project explores the construction of a tool for children to explore the world of pop-ups, and the uses and effect of this tool on children's mathematical learning.
Popup Workshop 1.0 is now available (Macintosh) | ||||
Computationally Enhanced Construction Kits
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Sewing Circuits Leah Buechley, Nwanua Elumeze and Sue Hendrix
We are designing a construction kit and acompanying activities
that will allow kids to learn about circuits through sewing. | ||||
Molds and Three-Dimensional Printing Andy Lin and Leah Buechley
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Smart Tiles are small, computationally-controlled pieces that can be assembled into an array to create complex and beautiful dynamical patterns. The Tiles are essentially tiny LED-equipped "boxes", programmable by the user, that can be placed into slots within the larger array; the sorts of programs that one writes for the tiles are those typical of cellular automata (such as Conway's "Game of Life" system). The tiles also include piezoelectric disks, making them interactive; for instance, one can program a tile so that it will change its color when it is tapped gently by the user. | ||||
Hinged Dissections Jenna Blake
In this project we make physical models of geometric "dissections" -- techniques by which one geometric shape can broken into parts and rearranged into another. | ||||
Growth Derek Andersen, Carrigan Bennett, Pha Huynh, Laura Rassbach, Scott Reardon
Growth is a senior project in which L-systems "trees" are generated on-screen and then output in plaster on a 3D printer. projects by ttt alumniComputationally Enhanced Craft Items 
Tom Wrensch's doctoral thesis project focused on embedding computation and small amounts of behavior into small objects such as tacks and hinges as shown in the photos above. The three main areas of this project involve designing CECI prototype objects, developing a language to enable crafters to instruct their CECI objects, and building a software environment for programming CECIs. CECI Prototype Objects:
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Click here to see another spectre creation! SPECTRE is a senior project by Diana Butter, Jeremy Garcia, Ryan Lewis, and Tyler Nielsen, which involves the creation of a system for "affordable" 3D printing. The technique is based on a homespun classroom device first described in Cundy and Rollett's 1951 book Mathematical Models. The device consists of a series of layers of transparency material, each of which sits on a flat shelf. When the transparencies are stacked so that each one depicts a horizontal slice of a 3D solid -- and when the entire stack of transparencies is viewed under light from a distance -- a remarkable rendering of the entire solid is visible. The goal of this project is to develop classrom-friendly software that students can use to print out sequences of transparencies that can be used in the Cundy and Rollett device. Students will be able to create a 3D surface or solild on-sccreen and then request a printout of the solid in transparency layers that can be used in the Cundy and Rollett device to view the structure. HyperSpider | a computational environment for string constructions 
HyperSpider was developed by Ted Chen as a master's thesis project. It is a computational environment for the modeling of three-dimensional string sculptures. The user creates a model on-screen and the software prints a pattern which she may follow to create the real-world string counterpart.
| This page last updated June 1, 2005 |
