Yesterday, the Phyrtual Innovation Gym Fab Lab welcomed primary school class 3B from the Istituto comprensivo Piaget-Majorana and Headmaster Marina Todini. The young makers used computer-controlled devices to produce an unusual landscape created with their drawings.
Here is a recap of their experience by Federica Pellegrini, who together with Coach Mauro Del Santo, helped the young makers out in the lab.
At school, the children had already cut out black and white shapes to create their daily landscape, inspired by Bruno Munari "Nella nebbia di Milano."
Traffic lights, bus stops, shops, people walking their dogs, slides and swings and even Rome’s characteristic drinking water fountains.
In the Fab Lab, they admired the many objects that have been created with laser cuts and were surprised to discover that many objects were produced thanks to files that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Others instead were the result of human creativity and the search for new shapes.
Then, they noticed that the laser cutter was producing their shapes and silhouettes: “Look a tree, a merry-go-round … How did you do that?”
The magical moment is always when the hatch of the laser cutter is opened to retrieve the mysterious profiles and silhouettes that were cut out of wood. As soon as the children began recognizing the shapes, they understood what had happened. Their drawings had been transformed into small objects. And they intuitively understood the various phases: idea to drawing to computer project to unique objects.
Then, it was time to insert their silhouettes on a platform that was created in the game-lab to create a unique landscape animated by the children’s profiles and silhouettes.
The final phase, was for the children to understand the concept of perspective and place the larger objects farther back and the smaller ones closer up front. Although perspective is not part of the third-year programme and they will address it next year, they still enjoyed learning by doing and playing, as it allows them to explore and analyse the world. Creating the landscape, allowed them to experiment with various combinations, create different scenes, realistic and expressive panoramas, thanks to their ability to capture reality by its main traits, as only children can do.
