The MIT Morningside Academy for Design invited Nervous System co-founders, MIT alumna Jessica Rosenkrantz ’05 and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, to offer a week-long workshop at MIT exploring design and computation. “Building Complex Curvature from Flat Sheets” involved 15 MIT students in making a large aluminum sculpture now displayed on campus.
Participants constructed surfaces with complex curvature from flat materials like paper, wood, or metal. Normally, flat sheets can only bend in one direction making so called ‘developable’ surfaces with zero Gaussian curvature. They used custom computational design tools to contort these materials into highly curved surfaces without any forming or creasing. They learned how tools work, designed some demo parts, and constructed a large sculpture using these techniques as a group.
The sculpture was constructed from dozens of laser cut panels connected by rivets which we were cut, finished, assembled, and then installed on campus.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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