Art Teachers at Nuvu: Day #3

Today was amazing!  We continued to prototype our designs from yesterday but we want to tell you about the other parts of our day.  We toured two amazing Makerspace/fab lab/innovation labs and toured MIT's campus including an amazing piece of architecture by Frank Gehry and went to the MIT Museum. 

The Autodesk Build Space in South Boston: This lab has to be one of the greatest on the planet!  If you are not familiar with Autodesk, they make programs for people that make things.  In education many people are using Autodesk Inventor and other engineering programs for students.  This unique space has amazing machines on large scales open to residency groups at no cost. For example they have a 3D printer that can print up to a cubic meter! The makers in residence were creating amazing things including a 35 foot owl installation for a park out of corian (the stone countertop material), designing collapsible baby incubators for jaundice, creating prosthetics,  wearable self-employed army tourniquets and hologram images for packaging and advertising.  It was very inspiring to see how this makerspace could influence aspects of our future makerspace as well as unique ways to partner with our local businesses in the future. 

Dassault Systems 3DExperience Lab:  Dassault created programs such as Solidworks and Catia, an airplane modeling software.  The 3DExperience Lab was equally amazing but on a much smaller scale, modeling something much more obtainable in an education or community setting. It has everything a maker could want!  The lab has 3D printers of many types, including resin based, carbon infused, and traditional styles.  It has laser cutters, reduction modeling tools, virtual reality, vinyl cutters, sandblasters, sewing and embroidery machines, silk-screening, wood-shop tools and more.  Believe it or not, it was all in one room! This lab ran with the help of interns and co-op students from local universities. Dassault provides this lab for their employees to use for personal and research related work.  Their future goals are to open up more options for start ups and public use.  Hopefully some labs like this start to pop up in Milwaukee!

Of course, for us art teachers, seeing the Frank Gehry and the MIT Museum exhibit was also amazing!  Frank Gehry is an art teacher favorite. The MIT exhibit was a retrospective of Santiago Ramon Y Cajal, a scientist that made amazing field journal drawings of the human brain and its inner-workings before the science was sound and before computer imaging or even MRI scanning came to be! His drawings were amazing works of art and proved to be scientifically accurate in comparison to modern computer images of the brain and nerves. Check out some pictures in our slideshow below.  We can't wait to use the things we learned in upcoming seminars bringing this all together.