Sticky Nostalgia

For my third and last Action Project of my STEAM Electives class "Rapid Prototyping," we had to create something for our new school building. No matter if it's a bike rack or a memory foam chair, it just had to be appropriate for a work space or as we like to call it, a "family." The project was supposed to be solo, but there's certain projects that were a bit too much to handle for one person. I had one of those projects. I had an original idea of creating a hammock for the student space, but quickly changed my mind when the required materials weren't available. After a lot of thinking, my partner and I decided to still use the hammock and re-purpose it. We came up with the idea of creating a "memory net," as I like to call it. This just really consists of hanging the hammock up and posting pictures from the past on the hammock. In which the title "Sticky Nostalgia" was born. This was extremely fun, but it did take a while to gather the required materials.

"Phase 1" By DR & TC. Jan, 2016.

It was required that we have an Instructables page up in order for our viewers to fully understand our creation process. Find our Instructables page here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Hammock-Banner/

We were also quite inspired by the original idea of the hammock: http://www.complex.com/style/2013/07/summer-life-hacks/diy-hammock. Before the re-purposing process, this idea was awesome!

In all of my classes, we have something called Field Experiences (FEs). This allows us to go out into the field and understand the content of our class from a working experience; a more hands-on experience. One FE we attended was the Wasteshed in Humboldt Park. A woman named Eleanor said "the best thing about doing something for no profit is the non-stop feeling that you are helping someone else." This quote motivated and inspired me to make my project even more cooler just because there's people out there who work very hard just to give back daily to the community. Thank you Eleanor!

Below are 34 seconds of time-lapsed video, covering our whole creation process. For a every two seconds, our time lapse will capture two and a half seconds of motion being taken for each video.

While completing this project, I picked up on a lot of different safety hazards that, with common sense were easy to avoid. The only safety hazard I could really think of was the spray paint, which can become quite dangerous if you get enough of it into your system, so using that with care was a must.

Our project didn't require a lot of building, just a lot of brain power. There was the hanging of the hammock though. This consisted of hammering nails in the two hung up metal pieces in order for the hammock to be high up on the wall. My partner and I also had to gather spray paint. Generally, we wanted nice colors that would pop out on the rope like fabric of the hammock. We chose red, purple, and blue. We chose these colors because of the simple facts that they're dark and they look nice. We went into a building, not infested with people, and began spray painting our school's initials nice and big on the hammock. This was so fun! The only problem is the dangerousness of the spray paint. So I ended up leaving a lot of space between me and the spray paint. After the spray painting came the photo attaching. This was mildly easy, as all we had to do was attach the paper clip to the photo, then attach the photo to the hammock, but the knots in the hammock made this kind of difficult. The outcome was a lot nice then I thought it would be, which made me much more happy about myself. Here are 5 very important lessons I've learned throughout the entire process:

• Spray paint is easy to work with, with a steady hand and focus.
• Paper clips are quite versatile.
• Coloring is actually really important (seeing how the spray paint came out).
• Wood cannot hold hundreds of pounds daily!
• Your work doesn't always have to be compensated.

Lastly, in order for you to complete this project, I suggest a helping hand because the work load, physically and mentally is cut down the middle and this is such a relief. Remember that this project is not only for me and my school, but for you too, and I hope you enjoy our creativity!

3D Printing A Chess Set

The name of this course is "Rapid Prototyping." For the second Action Project of my STEAM course this Elective Term, we had to use a design, voted on by our class to create 3D Printed chess pieces. We also had to create a clay and cardboard model of our piece to kind of match the 3D model. This was all extremely fun, and time-consuming, but sometimes time- consuming is a good thing. There was math involved, as we had to calculate the Riemann sum of our 3D Printed piece! All, such cool stuff! The challenge was make every little thing we did precise, and this was a challenge because humans aren't perfect and the design that we had is just a little bit complex. Like I said before, this was a fun project and 3D Printers very well may be the future of humanity!!

Letter Generator 4000

The name of this course is "Rapid Prototyping," and don't worry, it's not AS complicated as it sounds. For the first Action Project of my Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) course this Elective Term, we had to use what we have learned the entire course to take advantage of the complex technology available to us (Cameo Cutter) and create a letter that was assigned to us. The other part of the project was to create a handmade version of that same letter. All together, we had to create a total of four letters, one letter on the Cameo and handmade, and another on the Cameo and handmade, and that's four. We did this to observe the very distinct differences between the handmade and machine-made letters. This was NOT easy, but very fun and creative.  It took a great amount of time to make my letters actually look good. On the positive side, I learned a lot about how to use the Cameo Cutter, which was pretty cool.