Native American Projects With Mr. G

Sometimes a collaboration with a teacher doesn't require a full blown planning session.  It can just be the result of a conversation.  That's how it works most of the time when I work with Mr. Gemmill, our 7th grade social studies teacher.  He was telling me about his Native American project where students would need to create an artifact and retell a folktale from their tribe.

From that conversation, we talked about using the 3D printer for students to design and create their own artifact as well as use the green screen with groups who wanted to make a movie of their folktale.  What happened over the next couple of weeks resulted in a pretty amazing collaborative project.

During the time we worked on this project, the students kept our 3D printer working steadily most days.  A few students pulled ready made designs from Thingiverse.  With those designs, students had to scale down some of the models using Tinkercad.  Other students chose to use Tinkercad to create their artifacts from scratch.    Students learned to manipulate the shapes to create their designs that you see in the pictures below.  The most involved projects included students creating an image in Inkscape and importing it into Tinkercad to manipulate.  Some of the projects created by the students on the 3D printer include:
- arrowheads
- Native American jewelry
- miniature tomahawk
- snowshoes - designed from scratch using Inkscape to create the outline in svg format to import into Tinkercad
- feather - used Inkscape to create the svg file and imported into Tinkercad
- vase

The 3D printed items were a challenge because we had to learn to manipulate the software in a short period of time, but green screen projects were probably my favorite.  For this project, students were to recreate a Native American folktale.  Students created a script to put the story in their own words.  They came up with props, wardrobe changes and the backgrounds for the various scenes.  The final product was a 3-5 minute video that was definitely screen worthy.  :)

Collaborations don't have to be a long drawn out process.  Just a quick conversation can result in incredible projects that students want to complete and do an amazing job doing so.