#pltw

its not directly working in the lab, but a really low-rung and labor intensive job in the test fields. like usually in a normal corn field, the farmer has plants, they do detassling in late june/early july, and the bugs pollinate it for the entire month of july using the non-detassled plants onto the female parts of the detassled plants and bam, you have corn. 

in my job, though, the actual research lab is full of corn breeders and scientists in the middle of a massive corn field that has hundreds of different strains of corn growing in it. they can’t just detassle and let the bugs and breeze pollinate the females-- each plant strain must be attended to in order to yield seed the researchers and breeders can use. theres way too much for them to do themselves, so the hire about 100 teenagers to do the dirty work. ill cover the specifics of corn pollination and why we detassle in another post because ive been getting questions about it (mostly from the “corn bukkake” shitpost) but basically my job is:

-check each plant for new shoots. cover the upper shoot with a special bag.

-check each plant for blooming tassles. cover the tassle in a special bag.

-without allowing any contact from the outside air (which is riddled with pollen that 200% CANNOT be allowed to touch the blooming females; we have to make sure to ONLY pollinate the females with the specific males to get the right seed) flip the shoot bag off and cover it with the tassle bag from pollinator corn, pollinating the plant

-miscellaneous stuff. like today we did tagging, where we put plastic tags covered in numbers and barcodes on very specific plants in the field. 

as for how i got the job, a rep from the research center came to my Project Lead The Way college class and talked about her job with breeding. later that year, our final project was to present a sustainable solution. I kept going with my thermogenesis/AOX research that I’d been working on with a partner, just applying it to a possible system on your roof that would provide electricity. this was a presentation in front of a set of judges; our teacher had called someone from each of the fields to which we were presenting, and he’d called back this researcher to watch ours. our presentation was 40 minutes long, 20 for me and 20 for my partner. I presented on manipulating the AOX pathway to allow more electron flow, potentially engineering a thermogenic plant out of a specific moss i had been looking at for that purpose, and my partner (whos a friend of mine going into mechanical engineering) presented on her idea of how to apply a possibly heat-producing moss in a system that an ordinary person could use to produce electricity in their own home. 

afterwards, i approached her, and she was pretty impressed and gave me her card!!! i emailed the research center and they said that they didn’t have any positions for internships, but did have open slots on their pollination crews if i wanted to get to know the plants. and here i am!

Today, my students entered the world of 3D printing with a roll of the dice. 

Earlier this semester, the PLTW class at Truman Middle School received a 3D printer. An Afinia H400 to be exact. It looks really nice sitting on the shelf in class. As soon as it was received, I had an idea for which of our 3D model designs would make a good first print and plans were put into motion.

After creating a few models to practice some skills, students were given the instructions for the dice project. They would be required to meet certain size requirements, but would otherwise had the freedom to customize each side of the die. Some students choose to go with the standard spotted design, maybe changing the size or position of the spots (called pips). Others are creating custom designs for each side. The project was initially due this week, but because some students finished early, we did our first batch of prints today.

This was a learning experience for me too. I set up the first attempt during a plan period and came back to find the print bed moving around as if it was printing, but no filament was being extruded. While invisible prints would be really cool (and possibly creating a massive source of income for the school if successful), it would have required there to be a physical object. My hopes were quickly dashed.

After resetting the machine and checking the filament line, I set the printer loose. Soon, my 7th graders began asking about the weird noise that started up and I looked to find this:

My first thought was that the software truly did scale up the dice like it said when loading the files. I then realized these were merely the rafts being generated (the scaling was merely to make it easier to see in the software). The rafts help make it easier for the print to adhere to the bed (the metal plate underneath them). After a little bit longer, the dice began to take shape:

My 7th graders were definitely intrigued and a few were already talking about getting to print something in 8th grade. I could not constantly watch the printing, but took moments in between helping students to steal some glances. The build time was 2 hours and 46 minutes, much faster than expected, so I knew I would be ready to hand out prints by the end of the day. I could quickly identify some potential areas to improve the instructions for the project, including setting minimum distances away from the edges for the pips and refining the pip measurements for printing. 

During my lunch, I checked on the prints to get some more pictures.

It was cool how one can just barely see the layers being added by the nozzle as it glided back and forth across the print. I am planning on starting the next batch of prints earlier so that my 8th graders can actually see this themselves.

Finally, after getting back from my first lunch duty shift, I found the printer had stopped. The bed of dice was resting at the bottom, cooling down from almost three hours of heat. The bed itself heated up to over 140°F, while the nozzle heats up to about 527°F in order to smoothly extrude the filament. Definitely high enough to be careful if needing to open the printer door.

Once the printer had cooled down, I was able to get everything out and begin the process of separating the dice. I was a bit worried at first about not breaking them, but after some looking around online, I remembered the putty knife that came with the printer. Removing the rafts was a bit tricky, but once I realized they could be physically removed with a small amount of force, it went quickly. 

PLTW: Stable Revenue Play