bubbles | Occasional Observations of Traveling Technology Coach

Exotic Bubbles

As the STEM 3D-printing bubble-wand-creation activity continues to percolate throughout the district, students are learning and discovering new things about the nature and physics of bubbles.

For example, regardless of the shape of the wand: square, circular, triangular, or heart-shaped —

— or even butterfly shaped —

the bubbles will be spherical.

But what about double-bubbles? Or triple bubbles? Or raspberry bubbles?

Students discovered that wands with split or multiple openings create exotic bubbles.

Also, bubbles can be stretched between two different wands, as long as there is plenty of bubble juice on each wand.

Bubble Wands at 811Q

I brought the 3Doodler printing pens and the plastic filament; the students brought their imaginations and bubble-blowing skills!

The activity started with a demonstration of how the pens work, including how to feed the filament in, how to charge the pens, how to turn them on and off, and how to start and stop the extrusion.

Next, I drew a small rectangle on a piece of paper, to use as a template to trace over with the pen. The melted plastic sticks nicely to the paper, and cools in a couple of seconds, so it can be easily peeled off.

It was the students’ turn. They drew shapes on paper, chose three favorite colors of filament, turned on their pens, and pressed the orange button! The trick to getting the plastic to stay true to a design is to press the end of the pen right onto the paper.

Some students got the gist of it right away and started working on their bubble wands.

Other students designed their favorite characters…Sonic anyone?

The students made a variety of wands, some from their imaginations and some from screen shots of wand designs that I had printed from off the internet. 3Doodler has some great 2D and 3D bubble wand ideas.

Here are wands the students made:

The last step was to go outside to the school yard and test them out. I am happy to report that there was 100% success rate for the bubble wands. We used Five Below bubble solution ($1.00 for a big bottle!) and the kids had so much fun!