Category Archives: Assignments

WGSC 2024 Presentation

Marcy Quiason of the Gender Studies program and Angela Vanden Elzen from the library and makerspace had the opportunity to present at the 2024 Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium conference. We discussed the how and why of including maker-based assignments into gender studies classrooms, followed by a workshop in which participants built out a maker assignment for one of their courses. Resources we used at the presentation are available below.

View our presentation (clicking the link will open PowerPoint in your browser in a new tab): Creating the Next Generation of Feminist Makers: Integrating Makerspace Activities Into Your Feminist Classroom
View or make a copy of the worksheet we distributed to help participants add a maker-based assignment to their courses (clicking the link will open Word in your browser in a new tab): Worksheet for Adding a Maker-Based Activity to a Course
Professor Quiason’s Creative Assignment (clicking the link will open a PDF in your browser in a new tab): GEST 100 Quiason creative assignment.pdf If you use any parts of this assignment, please be sure to credit Marcy Quiason.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Angela or Marcy

Making sound with film

By Kelvin Maestre

This winter, I took a course in Artisanal Animation. For my final, I was tasked with making an animation using any of the mediums we had studied. I was personally drawn to direct on film animation. It wasn’t the images that I was after, but the sound. The biggest inspiration for the project was Norman McLaren. McLaren was an animator for the national film board of Canada. He specialized in direct on film animation. One of his most impressive feats in the medium was being able to create his own hand drawn sound. I had made previous attempts to emulate McLaren’s process with little success. This time around, I decided I wanted to tackle the project in my own way. My initial thought was to use the laser cutter in the Makerspace, but the test ended in nothing but burnt film.

I had to consider another option. The only other machine I could use was the silhouette cameo. I was hesitant at first because I had never extensively used the machine. To my surprise, it was very easy to use making my overall process faster. Now I had the tools to etch the film, now it was time for the sound.

Sadly you can not just plop and audio file in the Silhouette cameo’s software. The cameo works best with vector based graphics, so get our sound to be cut-able we need to make it into an image file first. A quick Google search for “Sound to waveform graphic” yielded a website that does just that (link will be below). Once I had a image of my sound file, I ported it into the cameo’s software, resized the audio image, lined it up, and hit send.

One of the images from my stop motion animation

I wanted to see how far I could push the technology, and so I tried to etch a stop motion animation I made of my hand. The animation was shot in black in white (easier for the software to recognize), each image was then combined into rows of 24, plopped into the cameo software, and cut. The results was imagery that didn’t reflect the source it came from. The machine had added a layer of abstraction (you can see the result at the end!)

Here is a link to a video of the film being run through a projector!

Below is a list of links I used to do this project, including a link to an in-depth guide on how to do this yourself:

Makerspaces & Pedagogy: How (and Why) to Integrate the Makerspace into Your Courses

Interested in adding 3D printing and other makerspace tools to your courses, but not sure how? Below is a presentation delivered to Lawrence University faculty about some of the whys and hows of using the LU makerspace with coursework.

View the full presentation (with notes) in Google Slides

Here’s a general outline of the presentation:

What is a makerspace and what’s in our makerspace?
Why makerspaces?
- Hands-On, Kinesthetic, Active Learning
- Problem Solving Process
- Differentiation of Learning
- Prepare for Work
- Wellness
- Engaged Learning at Lawrence University
Challenges of educational makerspaces
Examples of uses from projects at LU and elsewhere by discipline/general subject area
- Studio Art
- Art History
- Theatre Arts
- Film Studies
- Math & Computer Science
- Music
- Humanities
- Anthropology
- Psychology & Neuroscience
- Sciences
- Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Things made by students outside of classwork
Things made by student organizations and campus departments
Where to find this stuff?
- 3D print search engines & general repositories
- Lesson plans
Designing
How to go about adding this stuff to your classes
Discussion

Since we presented this, we’ve also worked on a couple more ways to help faculty add the makerspace tools and equipment to their courses and research:

Makerspace Assignment Request Form: By letting us know about the intended learning outcomes and equipment they’d like to use, we can do some research and set up a time to meet to discuss assignment ideas.
Faculty 3D Printing Request Form: We’re happy to print objects that faculty may need for their teaching or scholarly/creative work. While faculty are welcome to come over and do their own printing, we know that sometimes this isn’t possible.

One slide from the presentation. Image links to the Google Slide of the full presentation.

More Virtual Reality at Lawrence University!

“One of the reasons I did that project was not only to explore my interest in it but also to give Lawrence the chance to pioneer in an art medium and form that not many schools are doing yet.”
Christopher Gore-Gammon ’17, on creating with virtual reality

There have been lots of exciting new projects and class assignments happening with VR (virtual reality) at Lawrence University! Take a look at the recent Lawrence University News post, “Use of VR tech now reality in classrooms; FaCE grant to ramp up pace” to learn all about them!