Get girls into STEM with Lego Hair #MakerEdChallenge

thingiverse

There's a recurring joke that the biggest barrier for girls to become engineers is representation: you'll have 99 Lego construction guys to one Lego businesswoman. But a Lego construction guy is just a hairless Lego construction woman... How I Created This I used FreeCAD, a free CAD program - an excellent choice for spotty internet access, with an exceptional Undo history. Measure the model. In my case, there were plenty of dimensions available online, and I just had to convert from metric. I started with the head diameter, added an arbitrary thickness, and created a construction circle - centered on the origin - with half that for the radius. Then I added an octagon around that, also centered on the origin, and picked any 3 sides to be tangent to the first circle. Then I set one side to be strictly vertical (or horizontal) so it won't spin, and we have our fully constrained base. Close the sketch and use the Pad button to bring it into the third dimension; from my measurements, I decided to pad it 0.45". Then select the top of the head and create another octagon around a circle, this time with radius 0.1" Pad that up a good 80 thou (0.08"); now flip the model over and add a sketch to the bottom, a simple circle of radius 0.202" Pocket that out of our solid with a depth of 0.375; now a minifig head could fit inside, mostly Now put another circle in the new pocket, radius 0.096". A hexagon might grab and release better, or some sort of flexible C shape, but I don't have a 3D printer, so I haven't tested the theory. Pocket this another 80 thou; now there's a place for the stud on top of the minifig's head to grab onto Okay, now we have a really basic Lego helmet. You can export into a more feature-rich artistic program, like Blender (at which I am presently horrible). Project - Make your own Lego Hair Objectives Students will learn how to make a geometrically constrained base compatible with Lego Minifigs; alternately, provide the above files to art students and those students will learn how to build on an existing model without warping the original internal geometries. Audiences Depending on the version of this project, it could either be art students who understand the Blender basics or math students who understand the FreeCad basics. Preparation Students will need computers onto which FreeCAD either has already been installed; unless this is the art project, in which case they'll need Blender, which is also free. Steps! In the version where you're following How I Designed This, just follow how I designed mine. In the version where art students are making something pretty out of something functional: Download the file smoothlegohelm.stl from this page and (optional) legoponytail.stl Import it into your 3D Art Program Draw hair on the outsides of the helm, without going above the top line or altering the insides. You may remove the ponytail if you like. Print your product and see how it looks. If I designed it properly and the default fits a standard minifig, the artistic helmets ought also to fit a standard minifig; and the ponytails ought to be interchangable. Results For the geometric version, assessment should be based on functionality - if it works, good job. For the artistic version: effort, vision, and preserved function are all key.