I took a chance on a product I hadn’t used before.  Even done that?

In the world of making, unpredictability is welcome.

Spoiler alert: It was harder than I expected.

When it’s difficult, that means you have a perfect opportunity to learn more than you could have imagined.

It started at “Maker Camp” at Green Mountain Performing Arts Center in July, 2016.

The official title of the one week camp session was “E-Wearables,” and we did some project work in that area.  See the post on the Maker Camp experience here.

We made all kinds of things.  We made green screen videos, volcanos, e-textiles, vehicles of all sorts, and,

We made “bugs” and I blogged about the bugs in my blog and it was bomb.

Here’s a 9 second clip of what they are:

 

Here’s a link to the website : “Catch the Bug” from @GetTeacherGeek.

Or I’ll Bug ‘splain it to you:

It’s a bot that built onto a plastic, bug-shaped body.  It has two hobby motors that spin except when one of the tentacles bumps into a wall, causing a switch to cut off power to one or both motors.  The hobby motor shafts have plastic tubing in it that act like tires. Unlike wheels that rotate perpendicular to the ground, the turning action of the shafts is somewhat horizontal to the surface it travels on.

The first video explains the bug and shows how’s it’s made.

Warning: This one is long! Really long!

Skip through if you are not interested in soldering.  Some of the video uses Snapchat as a video creation tool. Most of it uses iMovie.  Video from the two creation tools were blended together in YouTube’s Creator Studio:

And now a short clip from Maker Camp that shows the participant giving it their best.  This video is made exclusively with the Snapchat app.  We did not send our snaps to anyone.  I did not add the snaps to my snapstory.  I just downloaded each 9-10 second stap and strung them together in YouTube’s Creator Studio:

 

To be clear, the two videos are out of order.  I tried it out at Maker Camp first. Then I brought the materials home and tinkered with them by the pool in August.

As I was tinkering, I filmed my successes, my failures, and my rebounds from setbacks.

I sent the bugs to the Maker Camp participants who expressed interest in receiving them as soon as I was able to finish the soldering.  I’m ready to do this again!

Here are some videos from TeacherGeek:

 

 

How do you feel about unexpected difficulty?

What do you do to learn from things that don’t go as you had expected?