Make maglev cars with Google SketchUp

Concept to reality with Edmunds Middle School makerspace

Hear from a group of 6th grade engineers who got to use their school’s nascent makerspace to design their own magnetic-levitation (mag-lev) cars in Google SketchUp, and then actually make them.

The students spoke to us this past winter as part of Edmunds Middle School’s Digital Learning Day open house, where the community was invited to come in and visit classrooms and speak with students about the role of technology at their school.

These students took part in the afternoon “speed-geeking” session, during which groups of students explained their projects to visitors in six-minute sessions. At the end of each six-minute block, visitors would rotate through to the next student group. In addition to this mag-lev session, students spoke about the tools they used to measure toy car velocity, creating a reading log with a Google Form, and making book trailers with iMovie.

A huge thank you to Mr. Eric Schoembs, makerspace guru at Edmunds and his entire class of engineers for sharing their projects with us.

Audrey Homan

Audrey Homan is a Vermont-based digital media producer, and producer of The 21st Century Classroom podcast. She's worked in non-profit communications for more than a decade, and in her spare time writes tiny video games and mucks about with augmented reality and arduinos, ably assisted by five dogs. Interviewing students and yelling in PHP are the best parts of her job.

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