Over the course of the Summer, Eoghan Downey and I worked at the Timothy Smith Network leading a portion of their digital design intensive. We worked with other educators to teach different digital design programs to high school students in the greater Boston area. We were in charge of teaching a module on 3D modeling where we used a program called TinkerCAD. We were also teaching assistants on the other two modules: Sketchbook and Canva.

Our leadership goals over the summer were to successfully design a course in 3D modeling, to have each of our students complete a physics based 3D model of a balloon powered car, and to successfully assist the other teachers with any issues or questions the students may have in their modules.

We started off the summer with a week-long professional development intensive where we worked with Tufts’ professor Intriligator to better understand how to develop a curriculum. Along with our other teachers, Jordan and Amanda, we used a website called Miro board to talk about who we were catering our lessons to and how we could best understand their needs and how to help them. We focused on a demographic of high school kids working from home and online with varying circumstances concerning family, internet and other jobs. We talked about how we could hold these students’ interest and how we could successfully cater to both technically and artistically inclined kids. We also all worked together to design a “exploration day”, which we later held in the summer, where students would be able to learn the applicability of the new skills they were learning. This also included guest speakers from Harmonix who came and spoke to the students about their work and how they got to where they are today.

After our professional development, we started working on putting together our actual curriculum for our 3D modeling module. We first spent a few days teaching ourselves TinkerCAD in order to familiarize ourselves with the program. We ran through many interactive demonstrations on the website and ended up deciding to use some of these in our curriculum itself. After we finished mastering TinkerCAD, we started scheduling our curriculum. We broke down day by day, creating projects for the students to work through and lessons on 3D modeling and TinkerCAD. We also spent some time developing a physics lesson which would tie into the modeling the students were doing. For the physics lesson, we researched different ways of teaching high schoolers basic physics concepts, specifically the concept of energy and energy conservation. We then created our own slides from scratch which featured multiple choice problems and questions in order to keep our course as interactive as possible. Our main concerns while developing our curriculum were maintaining interest over a virtual lesson and accurately predicting how much material we would be able to get through each day. Our solutions for maintaining interest were to make the course interactive and have the students share their work and give feedback on others projects. In terms of time scheduling, while we had each day planned out, we also had both extra lessons and optional lessons we could add or cut if needed to stay within our time restraints.

A few weeks later, the course started with a module on sketchbook taught by Jordan. This course was helpful for us to begin to figure out how to teach in an online environment. While we were not the lead instructors in this section we were able to observe how Jordan ran the lessons, which allowed us to plan out what our own lessons would look like in the coming weeks. We also frequently went into breakout rooms to help the students with any technical or conceptual issues they might have had during the lessons when Jordan was busy assisting somebody else. This gave us valuable teaching experience which would make the transition to lead instructors in the next module smoother. It also gave us an opportunity to begin connecting with the students and to begin understanding how each student learned material the best. As online instruction prevented face-to-face interaction, these one on one breakout rooms were critical for learning about our students and how to best teach them. 

After Jordan’s module we finally got to start teaching the students directly. We started our lessons with an intensive demonstration of TinkerCAD using both presentations and live demos where we walked through how to use the program. We then had the students start working on the basic functions of the program. We had each student work through a few basic lessons on the website, which went over how to add and resize shapes, move and manipulate the camera, and create holes to cut out parts of premade shapes. From there we had the students work on basic projects like designing a chess piece, a die, and a luggage tag. When students had individual questions or got stuck, we would go into “breakout rooms” with them and help them one-on-one to better understand how to use the program to do what they wanted to. After these basic lessons, we started having the students work on “design challenges”, where they would design a cake and house from scratch. These challenges started with a designing phase, where the students would map out their ideas and break them down into basic shapes, before actually working in tinkercad to create their designs. 

The next week, we started out with our physics lesson, going through how energy and energy conservation works. We went through concepts like gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy and elastic potential energy. This was presented through a slide show with interactive elements where the students would work out basic physics problems using the concepts that they had learned. After this brief interlude, we went back to tinkercad where the students designed balloon powered cars. After each student had finished creating their cars, they redesigned their basic prototype using the physics concepts from our lesson. We had each student share with the class their new designs and how they integrated physics concepts to change how the car functioned.

The last portion of our course was a final design where the students were able to choose from a few projects to create. These projects would later be 3D printed and delivered to their houses. The projects were mostly space themed and included a space station, a spaceship, a moon, a planet and an alien. These projects were multi staged and required the students to work in different tinkercad workplaces and combine the parts at the end. The added complexity of these projects required us to be creative in helping the students solve their problems because we refrained from giving them direct solutions, but rather guided them to figure out how to use the program to solve the problems themselves.

After our module ended, we invited guest speakers from the video game company, Harmonix to speak to the students about different uses and programs for 3D modeling. These speakers spoke about their own personal experiences in the field and lent a new perspective on how the students could utilize their new found skills professionally. They also showed several exciting models and demonstrations, which helped the students see the real life potential of 3D modeling.

The next and final module of the course was a program called Canva, which was taught by our co-instructor, Amanda. We assisted Amanda by helping students with individual questions they had on how to use Canva, which is an online software used to create posters and social media posts.

The final piece of our time at the Timothy Smith Network was converting our curriculum into something that could be easily understood and retaught by future instructors. We spent about a week working to create demonstrations of how to use tinkercad and video walkthroughs of multiple projects the students worked on. We also rewrote our schedule and curriculum to be better understood by instructors who may be new to TinkerCAD and better reflect the pacing of our module.

Overall, we extremely enjoyed our time working with Amanda and Jordan at the Timothy Smith Network. The children were all incredible and their enthusiasm to learn kept us excited to teach throughout the summer. Even though the online format was less than ideal, the resolve of everyone around us was inspiring and we all were able to make the best of the situation. As this was our first time teaching in an official capacity, we had to develop new skills in order to efficiently communicate with different types of students. We thoroughly appreciate the new skills we have gained throughout our time and we can only hope that our students have learned as much from us as we have from them.