Posts Tagged ‘design’

Sierra College Student Clubs invited to Hacker Lab

Wednesday, January 29th, 2014

Sierra College x HL School Flyer V2Sierra College is partnering with Sacramento Hacker Lab to encourage innovation in the greater Sacramento region. Learn more at Sierra College CACT & Hacker Lab Partnership & 3D Printer Spur Innovation.

Student clubs can arrange special discounts to join Hacker Lab.

Sierra College Center for Applied Competitive Technology (CACT) also supplied a 3D printer and soldering equipment to Hacker Lab so members are able to use this equipment to develop new products.


SparkTruck takes hands-on learning on the road

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas appeared in Spirit, the Southwest Airline Magazine and described the Stanford Univiersity students who take innovation to the streets. In the SparkTruck, they visit communities and give kids a chance to exeperience the fun of making things and being creative. The goal is to spark their enthusiasm for invention. You’ll be inspired by how these graduate students are creatively teaching STEM outside of the classroom.


Colfax High School Students Receive MIT Invention Grant

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

Congratualtions to Jonathan Schwartz and Colfax High School students who have won  a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam grant in the amount of $7,500 to create the Tri-Metric, a construction layout tool that can be used when building emergency housing to increase structural integrity. Colfax High School is one of 16 high schools nationwide to be selected as an InvenTeam this year.

Schwartz is active in the Sierra STEM Collaborative and the Sierra College CACT has supported improvements to the Colfax design, engineering and product development Career Technical Education program through grants.

The Colfax students will invent a Tri-Metric tool that can be used when building emergency housing. The goal is to make it easier to lay-out a house. It would allow novice builders to make sure the floor, walls and roof are all square, maximizing support to make the home sturdy. The students hope to design the mechanical device so it can be manufactured for under $20. The idea is to build in all the complex math of trigonometry into the tool so it can be used by anyone.

Schwartz, himself an inventor, says that students will experience working on a team and applying critical thinking skills. “They will design, and repeatedly prototype, test, and rebuild the Tri-Metric construction tool over nine months. They will go through the same experience that inventors go through,” said Schwartz. “In June, the students will showcase a prototype of their invention at EurekaFest at MIT in Cambridge, MA.”

Carol Pepper-Kittredge, Director, Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (CACT), Sierra College will mentor the team. “This project is an extension of the leadership Jonathan Schwartz and Colfax High School have demonstrated as participants in CACT’s Sierra STEM Collaborative,” said Pepper-Kittredge. “By applying their design, fabrication and math skills to solve a global problem, students, especially young women, will be inspired to consider technical careers.”

Entrepreneur and author Peter Sims, who wrote Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries and coauthored the best-seller True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership with Bill George will also mentor the team. A Colfax High School graduate, Sims has already met with students and inspired them with tales of how industry leaders innovate and produce new products.

 


Colfax Record: Engineers in Training

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

Martha Garcia, Colfax Record Editor, wrote Engineers in training at Colfax High on May 24 about the Weimar Hills students’ experience building Sierra College CACT Tech-Explorer catapults.

From the article: “Teachers and administrators hope a recent visit to Colfax High School will catapult Weimar Hills Elementary School students into technical careers. On May 15, the eighth-graders were introduced to design, engineering and manufacturing concepts at the Tech-Explorer event in the classroom of Jonathan Schwartz, Colfax High math and pre-engineering teacher. Students used lathes, mills and other power and hand tools to build and assemble catapults.

The event was made possible through a Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) Collaborative Grant from Sierra College. The program not only introduces students to Colfax High, it also aims to make them aware of opportunities in high-paid local careers and education paths at Sierra College in mechatronics, engineering, welding, energy technology and drafting and engineering support.

Schwartz said the Weimar Hills students first worked on their math skills using the fraction contraption, a game Schwartz developed as a tool for learning math. Last week, the 60-plus students spent the day in Schwartz’s classroom building catapults out of aluminum and wood. ‘They used all sorts of shop tools from a mill to a metal lathe, they got a taste of the high school … and they got an introduction into pre-engineering,’ Schwartz said. …” Read more on the Colfax Record

 


Picasso inspires auto design

Monday, November 28th, 2011

“Car designers typically start sketching cars by drawing an outline, Mr. Warming said, but Picasso did the opposite,” writes Vanessa Fuhrmans in the Wall Street Journal article The Man Who Reinvents Wheels about Anders Warming. He is the new design chief for BMW Mini. Evidently Picasso “used detailed shading to shape the contours of what he was drawing and then followed with the outline” and Warming used a similar design method and created hundreds of sketches.


Mousetrap inspires innovation

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Emerson wrote “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” That is the theme of the new Smithsonian exhibit of patent models from the Rothchild Collection. See the article in the Wall Street Journal 11/26 Trying to Build a Better Mouse Trap (Rachel Wolff).