STEM Study Night at Fab Cafe Shibuya

Takehiro Hagiwara (MESH), Aki Kawana (Loftwork), Youka Watanabe (FabLab Kamakura), me!, Matt Krebs (anthropologist), Clint Hamada (Yokohama International School)

I was excited to be asked to participate in the presentations and panel discussion for the STEM Study Night at the Fab Cafe in Shibuya in December.  I shared an overview of our K-12 design program and its use of Design Thinking, and participated in the panel discussion Q&A at the end of the session.  

The evening was well attended, with presentations and the following format: 

Moderator: Youka Watanabe 19: 00 - 7:05 p.m. Youka Watanabe Introduction 19:00 - 19:10 Daisuke Okabe: The Idea of STEM 19:15 - 19:30 

Matt Krebs: FabLabs x Cultural Anthropology in Japan 19:30 - 19:45 

Sarah Sutter: Case Study - The American School in Japan 19:45 - 20:00 

Clint Hamada: Case Study - Yokohama International School 20:15 - 20:30

Bradley Hayes: Case Study - The British School in Tokyo 20: 30 - 8:45 p.m. 

Takehiro Hagiwara: MESH 20:45 - 21:00

Aki Kawana:? What's Creativity 21:00 - 21:30 

Panel Session

 Check out the link to the program with bios of all the presenters. This was one of several preliminary events leading up to the Fab Learn Asia conference later in December, held in Yokohama. More on that to follow!

Even better - Fab Cafe Meetup the next day!

Daiki invited us to attend the Meetup at the Fab Cafe the next evening (2/24), so I opted to go and see what people were going to share. Such a fun couple of hours!

First, Daiki introduced me to Toshi, the "boss" at the cafe, who later introduced me to the two Autodesk Japan reps who were there. One of them does the workshops for their apps, and would be a great option to visit school at some point.

The presentations ran the gamut from wearable art of a more conceptual bent, to beautiful jewelry, to installations, to useful objects, to . . . well, lots of things!

There was a group of recent art school grads with a project called "Dialog" which included "secret sentence" jewelry, "conversation" necklaces of circles of acrylic with magnets, a dialog about the weather, and a touch concept that was wearable in two parts (over and under clothing) with magnets, and ripple jewelry (this all makes more sense with photos of the objects . . . )

Saori Kanihiro presented her writing earrings, beautiful thin brushstrokes of language turned into jewelry.

Apistec.jp presented about 3D printing and the printer kit he has available.

The MESH project, Make, Express, Share, from Sony, presented their sensors that have sort of scratch-like interfaces  - connective DIY kind of things that let you do all sorts of things pretty easily.

Last in the evening was the XSense presentation, which includes 3D CG, Projection Mapping, and 3D printing - the concept of boundary dissolution, boundaries between old / new, traditional arts / contemporary culture, etc.

 Here's the link to the page of presenters for the evening. Otherwise, here are some of the quick shots I took of presenters and things they shared.

Fab Cafe Shibuya: Best PD in ages . . .

2/23 was a PD day at school, and three of us were lucky enough to be able to travel to Shibuya to go to the Fab Cafe and meet with Daiki, who gave us a great overview of the space, tools and software one could use in the space.

We did quick hands on with AutoDesk 123D Make, 123D Creature, Adobe Ideas, and talked about 123D Catch, MeshLab for simplifying triangles, Grasshopper as the plugin for pyroetric modeling in Rhino, and other options like Modo (mesh), and 3DS Max, as well as Tinkercad and Sketchup.

We got to output a quick vector sketch to the laser cutter, in two versions of acrylic (two thicknesses, one also was a mirror).

We collaborated on a "creature" in 123D Creature and output that to the 3D printer.

Here's Dave getting scanned

We also got to play with the Sense 3D scanner  - first Dave got scanned, then I did. :)

Here I am, scanned! 

There are other options (this didn't have great resolution) such as the Makerbot digitizer, and the iSense for the ipad. Kids can also use 123D Catch on their iphone or android, which seems to have the same resolution (roughly) as the Sense scanner.


Here are a few other neat things we saw around and about on our visit:

showing settings with the laser cutter on acrylic

showing depth/darkness settings on the laser cutter

scale and resolution from the 3D printer