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This lesson invites students to merge creativity, storytelling, and engineering through the design of a moving automata. Students explore how art and motion can work together to express ideas, emotions, or narratives using simple mechanisms such as a rotating handle and an up-and-down cam system.
In this hands-on lesson, students will brainstorm imaginative scenes, such as a rabbit leaping across a meadow, a boat rocking on waves, or a character popping up behind a wall, and bring them to life using paper, cardboard, wooden sticks, and other simple materials.
Throughout the process, students will document their creative journey through sketches, notes, or digital journals, experimenting with how form and motion can tell a story. This activity connects artistic expression with basic mechanical design, encouraging curiosity, problem-solving, and innovation.
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
I expect this lesson to engage students by combining creativity and simple engineering through movement. It will encourage them to experiment with storytelling and design while learning how basic mechanisms work and how it can be used combined with art. Students will develop problem-solving skills and confidence as they bring their artistic ideas to life through motion.
Could I have done this activity without the teaching aid you have fabricated?How do you think digital fabrication improves the activity vs utilizing traditional methods? What is the extra value?
I think it could be possible, but it wouldn’t have the same impact. The mechanism makes movement visible and interactive, helping students connect art and engineering. This method also increases the engagement on the project and provides students with tools to create more elaborated projects.
What are some challenges I expect when I do the activity with your class?
I think that the durability and maneagability of materials is something that has to be taken into account, it’s not the same to manipulate the material as a teacher than as a 14-15 year old. Manipulative instructions should be taken care of before providing the material to explore.
What did I learn during the fabrication process?
There are some awesome ideas online that can be useful but need to be adapted in order to work. Designing the whole artifact requires a lot of practice, trial and error, until one can achieve the desired result.
Use a laser cutter to create the parts for the simple automata mechanism using the document provided in the paper merch.net website.
(*this picture was taken from the website: www.papermech.net)
The pieces for the base didn’t work for me, so I had to adapt it by using cardboard. The project on the website uses a continuous servo, and a controller. The adapted idea is much simpler with a mechanism activated by hand.
Follow the sample model on the website. I adapted it by using cardboard for the base, it would look like this.
Ask students to analyze how motion is produced and discuss what happens when the handle turns. Encourage them to notice cause-and-effect relationships: how rotation translates into vertical movement.
This is purely an experimentation and analysis step.
Invite students to experiment with the mechanism, imagining what kind of artistic scene could fit the motion (e.g., a jumping animal, a popping figure, or a moving landscape). Have students sketch or write down their first ideas before starting their final design.
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