I decided to make one very "traditional" scribbling machine with three pens and a petri dish as a base (traditional because it resembles the machines in the activity guide). The second scribbling machine uses a single pen, and a plastic piece from a stuffed mechanical toy I took apart in the previous week's activity. I selected this piece of plastic because I thought it might produce some interesting patterns once set in motion. On this second machine, I used the motor to spin a wheel made from the top of a play dough cup. The two machines produced very different patterns, as you can see in the videos below.
This activity can be extremely open-ended, giving students just the initial concept (battery must power a motor which vibrates object holding pens to draw on paper) but leaving the rest of the design up to them. When I do this with my class in the fall, I will provide a number of objects of varying shapes, sizes, textures and colors from which students can build their scribbling machines.
The process of designing, testing, refining, retesting is naturally embedded in a project of this kind. There are so many variables, such as body shape, off-set weight on motor, pen types, motor polarity, and more, with which students can experiment. When I envision doing this activity with students, some questions that come to mind are:
- What can you do to make the pattern more or less uniform?
- What happens when you reverse the wires on the motor?
- Can you produce a drawing that is not circular?
- Can you intentionally produce solid versus dotted lines?
- What kind of design makes the machine travel farther/shorter?
Going beyond the basic scribbling machine requirements, students might create one that is turned on by a switch, lights up an LED, waves a flag, or is remotely controlled. The possibilities are truly without limit. Have you done this with your students? I'd love to hear about it.
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