Chutes & Laddders Chutes & Ladders the name of my tall bike. It was built over the course of 8 months from summer 2011 to spring 2012. When I first built it I wrote this about it. “This ship will never be done, but while its in progress it sure will go places.” 10 years later and that’s still true. Regular maintenance over those years has included cutting it in half and replacing the top frame when it started to buckle.

Fab Academy Fab Academy is a course from the Fab Foundation which spun out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. This class is a survey of digital fabrication and design. The course is taught in a distributed model where each student signs up with a node or Fab Lab local to them. Each week for 20 weeks a new topic is introduced in a global online lecture and then students meet their local instructors for hands on practice in their lab.

Mission Control 2020 Mission Control is a program developed by Mike Beach, Sal Mancini, and I at Artisan’s Asylum. This program was initially created in spring of 2020 just as the world shut down as a way we could deliver hands on summer programming to middle school aged students remotely. I came up with the idea that the 3 instructors are on Mars and the students are mission control who have to solve problems the astronauts run into.

Quickbox is a solution to a problem I encountered while teaching parkour in school. In the when there is no playground or outdoor area available for class we would bring in equipment and set up in the school gym, cafeteria, or wherever there was space. At the end of each class we would have to pack up this equipment and but it in some corner, closet, or storage space. Extra storage space is rare at schools and sometimes parkour equipment can be large.

Think Tank 2016 In 2016 I heard about a new event called the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race. It was a challenge to build an all-terrain, human powered, amphibious vehicle which was also a piece of art. I roped in my friend Carl and said that we already know how to build weird bicycles having built many for SCUL, Boston’s friendly neighborhood bicycle chopper gang. I said that we should challenge ourselves by building something that either doesn’t have pedals or doesn’t have wheels.

Mini Scaf Mini Scaf is another solution to a parkour problem. We use “Scaffolding” Scaf for short to make pop up play structures to train and run classes on. These structures are made from steel pipe and connectors most commonly Kee Klamps. We can design and build fairly simple structures for small classes or events easily with a paper sketch. For bigger installations or events we want to build more complex structures.

The Acorn Counting Machine "Your browser doesn't support embedded videos" I had a student who I was teaching basic electronics who presented me with an interesting problem. She had a family tradition that every year at Thanksgiving there would be a jar of acorns and the family would play all submit guesses as to how many acorns were in the jar. It had always been the role of the family patriarch to count the acorns and determine the winner.

Inspiration For Halloween 2023 I was inspired by Bob at I Like to Make Stuff who took a papercraft template for a cardboard Optimus Prime Helmet and modified it for laser cutting instead of hand cutting and enlarged it so that it would be the size of Optimus Prime’s head if he was 22ft tall. This resulted in the wearer looking like a human bobble head or a funcopop toy. Hence FuncopOptiums Prime.