School Market Day 2023 - Laser Cut Projects

 

Our 2023 School Market Day was held on Friday evening where our school had a Gala Night and in addition to this our students were running businesses with the theme of 'innovation' and the expectation that our students were using some of the technology that is available to our students in a creative way.

We have detailed a number of these projects and groups on this blog from our own classroom (in the junior school with students who are seven and eight years old).  Our school of two hundred students includes students who are Year Seven and Year Eight, who are up to twelve and thirteen years old.   An example is the group shown left.   They developed a series of boxes that were based around the use of the school laser cutter (we have an industrial sized one in a room at the back of the school).   The boxes shown in the photo were all produced by the students and the large sign at the front detailed the production process - this in itself was printed on our vinyl poster machine - A1 size.

Our junior students - who are five and six years old while too young to use the laser cutter independently used it to create the dream catchers shown left.  The laser cutter cut out the shapes for the bases and the students then individually decorated them by painting them and applying a range of materials to the dream catcher to aide their presentation.

The production process was shown in the photographs of the students making the designs and the finished product so that parents could see the creations.  We also applied sold stickers in order to allow the display to remain intact for the community to view the dream catchers rather then have them removed when they were sold.

Our senior students were able to use their DPE projects as a potential business.   Our students once a week complete their own Technology Classes as part of this program there is a DPE (Design Production Engineering) in this series of workshops students build their own speakers, as featured on this blog.  This group shown left designed boxes as shown but further developed their businesses by producing inserts (shelves and storage) on the inside for the boxes.  The two sizes shown cost the public eight dollars (for the smaller one on the left) and twelve dollars for the one on the right.   This wood used was a MDF composite which was used with the laser cutter cutting on the design and the different pieces and the students were responsible for assembling all of the parts and putting it together.   Further details about this product including the instructions will be posted later on this blog.

We had several groups of students have aspects of their business involved the production of coasters.  We have previously shown examples on this blog about one of the groups, a group of middle school students (Y5/6) who had a particular interest in NBA Basketball teams and logos created a themed series of coasters relating to popular teams.   They were able to have discussions about the Logo and using the insignia of a playing team and what they could and couldn't do related to then selling them.   They were able to work with a group of senior mentors who helped them using GIMP to complete the creation process.

We also used the laser cutter to develop a series of Gala Games that the student could be involved in running.  We used the laser cutter to precision cut the designs for the games such as Cornhole shown left.   The tables for this were laser cut which allowed there to be variation of the size of the hole (the junior one in addition to allowing the students to throw from a closer distance also had a larger target area.

Finally we used our Vinyl Printer to produce A1 sized posters with the rules and details of the games and activities.   Creating them on this machine meant that they were waterproof and could be displayed easily to not only show the students learning process but also display in this case the rules of the game.  We are going to feature this project in a seperate post on this blog.

We have a considerable amount of material related to this major school event and we will start the process of posting the activities and the creations during the remainder of the school year.