Summer Work at Tufts 2022: Johnny 5, VR, and Arduino
Johnny Five is Alive! Well, maybe not fully sapient, but he does move, as I demonstrate in the video above. This summer, I had the pleasure of working with 2 dozen extremely bright and motivated undergraduates for the CEEO’s summer session and I am equal parts thankful and exhausted. This was an amazing experience, working 9-5 every weekday to learn, develop tech, test ideas, and play around with an amazing cohort of motivated engineers.
This past spring, I spent HOURS sorting the 42100 Liebherr R 9800 Excavator set from LEGO (that’s just over 4,000 pieces!) in anticipation of doing a stupidly long time-lapse video of myself and others at the CEEO building up Johnny 5 with directions that I purchased from RJ Brickbuilder. But when the summer cohort was about to start, the fate of the bricks took a much more educational turn — we decided to use them as a team-building exercise on the first day! We gave the students all the instructions, showed them the trailer for the movie, and told them they had ONE HOUR to build the whole dang thing. Ok, we’re not that evil. We gave them the first whole afternoon to organize themselves and decide how they would manage the project. The next day, it took them… well, a little more than an hour, but they DID IT!!! However, with everybody being so busy getting their own projects off the ground, Johnny sat in the corner as our fearless mascot without the ability to use his motors. Once I found some time, I downloaded the LEGO Powered Up app, gave a quick glance at the instructions for how to create my own bluetooth remote controller, and then ended up hacking my own once I figured out which motors were responsible for various motions.
VR in Education
Another big projected I worked on was at the request of my educator friend and colleague in the Navajo Nation. He wanted me to test the ability to create objects collaboratively in VR and see how difficult it was to save and 3D print those items. I had two awesome interns working with me, and together, we took a deep dive into two different 3D VR CAD (sooo many acronyms!) apps — Gravity Sketch and ShapesXR. We figured out workflows to get back and forth between traditional CAD software you might find in educational settings (like BlocksCAD and OnShape) and the VR world, and how to 3D print anything you make in either setting. It’s kind of weird that there isn’t just one app that can seamless do all this yet, but we feel like we cobbled together some good tools to make it work for now, and at almost no cost beyond the headset and the 3D printer. Check out the website my interns made to see more about their research and the work they documented.
A really interesting thing about the summer interns is that they all came in with wildly different backgrounds and experiences with lots of different tech. Many of them were finding that they needed microcontrollers to accomplish their tasks. Being the huge nerd that I am, I pulled out all my personal Arduino educational kit stuff and offered to give some lessons. I ended up not needing to give too much direct instruction, because students could usually find the info they needed and self-teach. But it felt nice to be a helper when they got stuck on something. The Arduino company was also generous enough to equip us with a big set of the new Braccio++ robotic arms, which ended up making appearances in a few groups’ projects. They also definitely added to the MAD SCIENCE vibe of the whole lab, with all these giant robot arms strewn about — some lifting cups onto tables, some twitching helplessly when a servo went nuts, and some just sitting patiently in wait.
This is only a tiny sampling of all the cool stuff we did this summer. It was extremely inspiring to be surrounded by so many talented, curious, and capable students who made some really incredible stuff!
*Apparently, RJ Brickbuilder’s Johnny 5 is now in the running to become an OFFICIAL LEGO set!