Computer-Aided Design

A simple Birdhouse The aim of my final project for Fab Academy is the production of a set of Resources and  Strategies for designing Fab Lab courses for kids So, I wll take each of the weekly projects to add pieces for my final project.  This week, the aim was to use different tools for computer-aided design. The project I  have chosen is the design of a birdhouse that we used in the first module of Fab Lab  Kids Sevilla made with HELIOSA Neves, Jose Buzon and Juan Carlos Perez.  We proposed children to design a birdhouse directly on the computer. Based on the previously developed work, I drew various types of houses with MyPaint  and Rhinoceros. Then i developed a grasshopper definition that lets you create three  typologies of houses, that you can choose from.  The three typologies consider three  diferent kinds of birds living in Andalusia: "gorrión" (sparrow), "jilguero" and "verderón" I  chose the CAD tools primarily for convenience of use, although the software testing  experience recommended by Neil has been very rewarding.  We designed an assembly press fit system with simple parts that are precut for children  to put together in right angles.  This exercise is very flexible and can easily be redrawn to turn our bird houses in a box  of money, a football goal or the frame of a vehicle, for example.  The next step is to evolve the children to imagine their objects before it gets made made.  With the exercise of  bird houses, the modification of the object is based on numerical  data through the monitor. This takes children away of design, as they have little space to  express their idea of a perfect birdhouse.  So with image capture or scanning hardware such as webcams or kinect, you could get  data for parameterization of objects that would enable children to be more aware of their  design from start to finish. It would also be interesting to experiment with sounds.