The college just pushed out a TV advertisement about staying connected through the outbreak.
I’m in the video (68 seconds in). Not sure if that is a good marketing strategy.
Author Archives: BoB
3DP Point group set
I’ve been working on a set of 3D printed molecules for studying point groups. The set below contains 12 molecules that represent some of the point groups commonly taught in undergraduate inorganic chemistry classes. The structures are made using Mathematica’s curated data sets and a few molecules pulled from other sources. I split the set into two series for printing, each taking about 3 h to print.
#Making ready for COVID-19
It sounds like the CDC is going to recommend that everyone wear face masks to help fight spread of the coronavirus. Now, since the government is incapable of handling the most rudimentary of supply chain issues (probably because a few senior officials refused to recognize the thread), we are supposed to make our own. Fortunately, we can. Rozenn and I made some for the droids too. No one knows how the virus affects droids, so best to be on the safe side.
#Make ready for COVID
There’s a lot of buzz on the interweb about 3D-printing personal protective equipment (PPE) in light of the severe shortages across the country and especially close by to me. (I’m sure it has nothing to do with sending much of our supply to china last month.) I wanted to see how easy it was to actually do.
I’ve got my 3D printer, a Prusa MK2, up-and-running in my home office. I followed these instructions for making a mask and this design for the face shield. Both designs are reported to be printable without the use of supports or other fancy settings, so I loaded them on the build plate and off I went. After 5 hours of printing (3 for the mask, 2 for the shield) I ended up with this.
I’m surprised at how well these designs printed with no modifications needed. I’ve got some temperature calibration to tweak because both designs have overhangs that printed poorly but only affected the aesthetics of the final object. Double sided tape worked just fine to keep the document transparency in place. I’m now ready to fight the coronavirus … or clean the litter box.
The COVID on-line transition
As part of my mad dash to transition to on-line teaching, I’ve started making videos. Since I’m not a fan of on-line teaching, I thought I would at least try to make it interesting and play around with some film design. At the very least, I hope that it is geeky/dorky enough to keep students’ attentions for the duration of the video.
I figured out how to embed a quiz into a video, one of which is shown below. What’s really exciting is that the quiz, if it is in a learning management system like Blackboard, can be integrated into the grade center, so I can now use videos as a form of interactive pseudo-just-in-time assessment.