Walkout Frog

thingiverse

From May 1-15 2019 Oklahoma educators "stood strong" (it technically wasn't a walkout since it is prohibited for public employees to engage in strikes here) outside their classrooms to protest several issues surrounding education funding in the state. By adjusting our schedules my spouse and I were able to ensure that one of us was home with our six-year-old son (aka; "favorite-young-inventor"). During that time, we improvised a lot of S.T.E.A.M. based activities, of which the “Walkout Robot” was one. After attending a lecture by a visiting engineer my son asked me what I had done at work that day to which I replied I saw a presentation about robots. He then suggested that we build a robot. We used rolled-up cardboard and packing tape to create a simple structure for the basic form. We then covered it with a thin layer of modeling clay and I helped to shape in the details. Once we dried the clay he painted it according to his own artistic vision. After he painted it he announced that he wanted to make copies to give to his teachers once school started back up. So the next day he used my phone to take a large number of photographs and I helped him to load them into Pix4D Capture to build a photogrammetric model. After that I did the subsequent model processing. Once we had the digital model sliced we took it to the makerspace at the local community center to print three copies. After they were printed, we worked to sand, glue, fill, and paint the printed copies. Upon returning to school he did give one to each of his teachers. In the spirit of keeping the S.T.E.A.M. lessons going I told him that in engineering it is essential to communicate and share your results and suggested that we share the model online so that people anywhere in the world can print their own copy. He immediately jumped on board with this idea. My hope is that if people do choose to print the “Walkout Robot” they will post it under “Makers” on Thingiverse or contact me via Twitter with a photo of the print, and let me know the city, state/province, and country they printed it in. We will then place a pin in a map mounted on foam board to add a geography component to this particular S.T.E.A.M. exercise. I've posted both an uncut version, and the cut version I actually printed. The cut version will adhere nicely to the build plate and only requires minimal support for the arms.