For challenge one of materials we had to make a wiki on a material that you use for making things. Some of the wiki’s that were already done had materials like: wood, plywood, steel, aluminum, cork, copper, and gold. As we looked at all the wiki’s I started to wonder what in the world were we going to use for our material, they have already done everything from wood to gold. While I am thinking I start twirling a plastic pen around my fingers, that’s it I think we could do plastic for our material. We found out that plastics are made from oil and oil is a carbon-rich raw mat erial, and plastics are large carbon-containing compounds. Also that plastic can be molded into an almost infinite variety of shapes and that plastic doesn’t react chemically with most other substances, so it doesn’t decay. It can also be melted down and recycled to make other plastic things.

For challenge two of materials we had to pick a word from the character list on the materials page under the paragraph of  instructions for challenge two. The word also had to be made out of upcycled materials, when something is upcycled it is made out of materials that have been put in the recycling or someone is ready to throw it away. For our upcycled materials we decided we wanted to use styrofoam, wood and cardboard. Before we actually picked our material we had to pick a word from: bravery, love/kindness, grit, gratitude, integrity, curiosity, cooperation, open-mindedness, adaptability, fairness/justice, empathy, forgiveness, loyalty, creativity, optimism/hope, zest, grace, commitment, spirituality, intellectualism, prudence/discretion, appreciation of Beauty, entrepreneurship, wisdom, advocacy, and humor. We decided to do hope because we thought it was a powerful but short word and no one had done it yet. We decided to make the H styrofoam, the O and P out of wood and the E out of cardboard. After we used a band-saw, sander, box cutter, scroll saw, and a handsaw we had all of our letters cut out. Then we decided to decorate with pink and orange spray paint, our word Hope was complete.

I had loads of fun using the tools in the makerspace and making the letters out of upcycled materials. This was another one of my favorite modules because I got to use my hand hands, the spray painting was especially fun. I want to do more engineering modules.

By: Zoë Magee