flashback to the 1980's
Greetings, my name is Rob Shoaff, and I have the privilege to participate in a 3rd year as a Maker Fellow with the Foundry Makerspace. This year I will be working as a Senior Fellow at the two high school campuses - John Harris and SciTech. My role at both schools will be building on what I have established last year at John Harris and the past two years at SciTech. Through the month of August all of the Fellows have gone through Orientation and started to ramp up for project launches. There are no specific
The last week of August is always interesting. There is a noticeable wind down that is palpable. It is odd because the weather is still a bit warm (in Central PA) so it feels like summer, but the loss of daylight at dusk gives hint to the change into the season of fall.
As I thought about my starting blog post, I thought that I would follow a question an answer session format. This was always something that occurred when you returned back to school…the ubiquitous “what did you do over the summer?” (side reference wolverines quote from Napoleon Dynamite.) Overall, I had a full summer outside the Foundry, which runs from August to June and July is a free open month. I had to shift around my open month from July to June and balance my other extracurriculars, of which I am involved.
Q: What was your summer like?
My summer started super fast because I went from being a Fellow to working as an Artist with the Marshall Math & Science Academy STEAM Camp, which ran for 5 weeks, from 6/12-7/14. This was my 3rd year in participating with the camp through my connection with LifeInPA / LifeThruTech. I worked with Mr. Joshua Spiroff in Visual Arts / Technology, where I developed an 8 day plan to connect the MakeyMakey, Scratch, and 3D Printing focused on Design Thinking. Below are some of the things we developed, which included a 3D printed trigger that became the interface for the Scratch Simon Says Game.
Partway during the camp I went to Ocean City, NJ with my family for our annual vacation. We had a great time connecting with extended family. I especially enjoyed riding my longboard around the town. The weather was a bit cooler from last year and I enjoyed reading books on the beach. While I was away I worked to develop some of the 3D models for the STEAM Camp. It was amazing to see VR show up at two places on the boardwalk: Liberty Virtual Reality and Hot Air Balloon VR. As a family we enjoyed fellowship in playing mini golf, working together in one of the escape room scenarios. and trying to get through a Laser Maze. Regrettably during the day, I stumbled upon a super fun 2016, 4 player game on the Playstation Store called SpeedRunners. While it would have been fun to have this during the entire week, it was perfect for the afternoon of rain.
The end of summer occurred with prep and teaching for the annual Asbury Park, NJ Inspire Life Camp. Just like the Marshall Camp, it was connected with my work through LIfeThruTech. I also have a final event in Erie, PA with the Inspire Life Conference over Labor Day weekend. To raise the level of the camp this year, I decided to make an arcade enclosure for my Raspberry Pi RetroPie. I purchased the materials and arcade parts and with the help of my dad, we created the MDF enclosure (a modification of the Rolfebox's Galactic Starcade on Instructables.com) This was a hit at the camp and I enjoyed hearing the middle school and high school student’s reaction to the old school games. I explained that they should take some time to visit The Silverball Museum along the boardwalk. See below for photos of the cabinet build.
Q: You mentioned reading books at the beach, what were their titles?
In the month of August, I picked up a few books on civic engagement and equitable community development.
“Whether headed at speed to the top right or working slowly and strategically to break out of the Castle quadrant, we all now need to understand - and be able to deploy - a fresh set of new power skills. Those new capabilities, and their implications for our everyday lives at work, at play, and as a society, are what this book is all about.” (p.32)
1. Engaging Community Participation
2. Identifying Critical Issues
3. Defining Goals
4. Research and Data Collection
5. Setting Benchmarks
6. Defining Performance Measurement
7. Developing a Timeline
8. Documenting and Reporting Results
9. Evaluation and Reflection
Value Propositions:
SEED assures that the design project effectively addresses the community’s critical needs and challenges.
SEED assures that a project promotes social equity and also reflects a diversity of social identities and values of the community it serves.
SEED assures that the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the project are clear and that the results will be measured.
SEED process assures that the community members and stakeholders are involved in the design and planning processes.
Q: What was the greatest thing you learned from last year’s Fellowship?
I think the biggest take away was that of macro level strategic planning. In my work with the high schools, I was able to help draw together similar discussions for Robotics, 3D printing, Digital Arts and Media, and Drones. Working with other Fellows, there was a sense of coordination of similar discussions that had not happened in previous years. Some of this was due to the fact that we were in 8 schools last year. All of this was related to developing internal school community - connecting teachers through a STEAM Team, and connecting teachers between schools.
Related to school community development was that of bridging relationships into the local Harrisburg community. This is an ongoing effort, but the discussions from Community Partnership Days and the Harrisburg Comprehensive Planning Process helped raise awareness to connect educational and career goals locally. Innovation is something that should continue to develop within each of the schools and helping students build a network inside and outside the school is extremely critical.
Q: What do you look forward to in this year’s Fellowship?
The number one element that is exciting this year is the growth of schools and the Fellowship cohort. We have a great group of Fellows, with a wide range of backgrounds to strengthen the Foundry Makerspace model of a Learning Community. The lessons learned over the last year are rolled back into the process to support student learning in ways that goes beyond classroom activities. The conversations in supporting teachers have grown exponentially and building out the STEAM categories at all schools is a primary focus. I am looking forward to the project launches of the AV Studios and STEM Labs because I see them as a Project Based Learning incubator for previous non connected classes such as ESL or Social Studies.
Q: Was making part of your summer?
Yes. Besides making the arcade enclosure that I mentioned above, I worked with the students at the camps to create some MakeyMakey devices. The first was the Simon Game (IMAGE). During the Marshall STEAM Camp Showcase, I enjoyed seeing parents reflect back to the days when they played on the Simon device.
The second was The DJ Maker 2018 that was build during the Asbury Park, NJ Inspire Life Camp.
Lastly, I was able to complete a 3D Printer build that I started back in August of 2017 - FLSUN Delta 3D Printer.
flashback to the 1980's...
specifically May / June of 1981 (I would have been 8 years of age)...
"Horowitz: The original Pac-Man was totally deterministic. It played the same way every single time. You could hide in a spot, walk away from the game, and the game would play forever, because the monsters would never get you.
We added some randomness to it, and we made the monsters have different modes depending on the level of the game the different amounts of time at each mode. They would either chase Ms. Pac-Man, they would run away from Ms. Pac-Man, they would go to some specific corner of the maze, or they would just take a bunch of left turns. When they went to their corner we made them go to a random corner instead of going at the same corner every time. Just doing that made it different every time."
"Macrae: When we first got them, our Missile Command games on the MIT campus were pulling in roughly $600 a week. If you do the math on that, that’s one quarter every three minutes on 17 hours a day. The problem became if a game lasted longer than three minutes, the quarter count would go down, or if it wasn’t being played 17 hours a day because people didn’t like it as much, and were not standing in line to play it, the quarters went down."
Here is an original Ms. PacMan that I played at the Silverball Museum. These were from Namco, but distributed in the U.S. via Midway. It started out as Crazy Otto, designed by Doug Macrae, John Tylko, Steven Golson and Kevin Curran of GCC (General Computer Corporation).
Another great game at the Silverball Museum was The Simpsons video game, which featured 4 players. I made it all the way through the game. I was surprised that nobody joined in as one of the other 3 characters to help me complete the game. It was released on March 4th, 1991.
