January 2020 STEAM Camp Overview of Learning Program

Overview of Learning Program

General

The STEAM Camp is a 9 day hands-on immersion that involves class time and build time. There are about 3 hours of class time per day, where we teach about collaborative design techniques, do design reviews, or other learning activities. There may be several invited presenters who will provide presentations from remote locations. Most of the time is spent with hands-on learning - whether using design and collaboration software tools - or doing hands-on builds. All learning takes place across multiple disciplines: science, technology, art, design, build, documentation, and most importantly - collaboration. The 9 days are divided into 4 days of collaborative design boot camp, and 5 Project Days. All of this is done collaborative, where in addition to the instructors doing their part in presenting material - we rely on participants teaching each other so that we create an immersion learning environment where everyone contributes.

The event is built around increasing participants' capacity to work collaboratively, by documenting and building upon each others' work. Moreover, this collaboration takes place globally. The January 2020 STEAM camp takes place in 3 locations - Belgium; Richmond,Virginia; and Texas. So when you join, you are joining a larger collaborative effort. This effort does not stop at these 3 physical locations, as we also have a Remote Participation option, as we broadcast our content between the 3 locations and between Remote Participants, who may be located anywhere that a video connection can be found. The remote participants have access to the Developer's Kit of tools and parts that everyone in the physical locations will be working with. As we broadcast the event live, Remote Participants have the chance do do all the builds alongside of us, and to participate hands-on in all the builds or experiments. Remote Participants can thus collaborate fully in uploading and downloading design, while engaging in rapid prototyping - to move the collaborative design effort forward in a significant way. Our goal is to leverage open design, fully open source toolchains, and open processes to involve as many people in our modular design. By breaking down projects into small parts or modules, we are able to involve a large team in effective, parallel development across the globe.

We are building continuity and community into the learning program as well. To prepare, students are encourage to download our software suite, OSE Linux, to become familiar with the tools before participating in the live event. The learning experience continues after the Camp, where we invite all onsite + remote participants - as well as participants from former STEAM Camps - to addition follow-up sessions. These sessions are held on Saturdays - for 2-4 hour Design Sprints, where we follow up on design and documentation projects, or possibly even pivot to other collaborative design. Our intended outcome of the STEAM Camps is to provide the collaborative literacy that allows all of us to work together. We are especially interested in technology that matters. We do all this while building a community of early adopters of the forthcoming open source economy, where a new paradigm of collaborative design replaces competitive waste.

All work aims at the release of marketable products that can meet real needs. We offer the special value proposition of lifetime design - where users can maintain or upgrade each product based on its open source, easy-to-build design, which uses common, off-the-shelf (COTS) parts in addition to parts that may be fabricated digitally such as with the 3D printer. Our goal is to foster an entrepreneurial spirit, where people contribute to their local economies, while collaborating with the greater world.

Detailed Curriculum

What are the critical tools that we need for effective collaborative design? These tools involve, first and foremost - Collaborative Literacy - a mindset and a practical process - that enables people to work together for the common good. Beyond these soft skills is a set of hard skills and interdisciplinary technical knowledge that enables one to come up with creative and effective design.

On the first day - we introduce Open Source Ecology's collaborative design work and provide an overview of our vision and practical techniques that can get us there. We introduce our philosophy - which we believe has the potential to tranform the world's economy from proprietary to collaboratve - with an accompanying cascade of positive change throughout the world. We dive immediately into practical tools of collaborative design - where each person builds a basic, rapid prototyping 3D printer from scratch, and runs a first print on the same day. The 3D Printer is called D3D Universal - a 3-axis machine with quick-connect tool heads - where we build addition tool heads on the second day.

On the second day, we dive into the design aspect - with a crash course on FreeCAD - an open source computer-aided design (CAD) tool. In one hour, we will teach you how to go from an idea in your head - to a basic design workflow - and end up with an object that you can print readily on your own 3D printer that you just built. From then on, you will do a number of simple designs in FreeCAD as you build your dseign skills. All the things you design will be simple, practical tools like a razor, screw driver, tool holders, et - that you then print and use through the rest of the program - and upload online so anyone can benefit from it or improve it.

The practical designs of the second day include a plotter pen holder and an electric motor holder. You can either print out existing designs that we have provided - or you can design your own or modify them - depending on your interest. The pen holder turns your D3D Universal into a CNC pen plotter for drawing pictures or circuits - or a simple CNC mill/drill. You will learn how to control these machines with the same Universal Controller as the 3D printer - by uploading new software, generating control code by hand, or using software such as Inkscape, KiCad, or FreeCAD to generate tool paths for your plotter or mill. Because D3D Universal has a height sensor, you will learn how to level the workpiece automatically - whether you are plotting or milling.

The intent of these exercises is to learn how these machines work, to the point that you can design and build a modified, larger, or more robust version that can be used in production. While the tools built are entry level and focused on education, they have a clear path of extensibility and scalability that allows them to become workhorse machines and a part of an open source microfactory that contributes to the local economy. For example, we are including the design our our professional grade printer - D3D Pro - with the SD card that comes with the D3D Universal - so that you can bootstrap to professional grade production. You can print more parts with D3D Universal, and reuse most of its parts - to build D3D Pro.