Lesson 2: City Architects v. Pollution Monsters

Lesson 2: City Architects vs. Pollution Monsters. In this lesson, the CADthinkers program introduced students to the challenge of designing a magical garden to combat urban pollution and provide shelter for the homeless. The lesson aimed to address real-world issues such as hostile architecture and pollution in urban spaces, educating students on the challenges faced by homeless individuals and the importance of green spaces. The students showed enthusiasm and dedication to learning, mastering new skills and actively participating in designing solutions. Moving forward, the program plans to continue focusing on 3D design and addressing social issues through creative problem-solving.

Aishwarya Ramkumar Babu and Tanvi Gupta
February 11, 2024

Lesson 2: City Architects vs. Pollution Monsters

To initiate the second week of the program, the CADthinkers learned the lesson, “City Architects vs. Pollution Monsters.” The lesson began by introducing the following proposition to our students, regarding a fictional society, named Green Oaks:

”Green Oaks used to be a pristine, beautiful place. There were green spaces, gardens, sustainable air quality, and clean lakes. However, recently, a large threat has taken over the area: small pollution monsters have destroyed the environment by increasing the trash and toxic air. Pollution is when things like car exhaust, trash in lakes, and leftover plastic exist excessively in urban areas, and it makes it harder for us to breathe. Green Oaks needs you to design a garden that can quickly save the city from this environmental harm, so that people can get back to their livelihoods, and the citizens of Green Oaks are happy once again.”

After the challenge was introduced to the students, they were given twenty minutes to brainstorm magical garden designs to combat the pollution issue. Once their ideas were outlined, the students got a chance to work together to design their garden on TinkerCAD. After just an hour, the students had mastered TinkerCADs free-handed 3D drawing tool, which they used to create numerous organic shapes in their designs. The students also learned greater proficiency in their design skills, being able to edit, resize, and create their own custom shapes autonomously, instead of with constant help.

The CADthinkers' Design

The CADthinkers crafted a design for a magical garden, created to provide an urban city space to fight urban pollution and overcrowding, as well as to provide feasible shelter for the homeless residents of many urban cities. By creating a tree-house, and plenty of benches for the homeless to find shelter and places to sit, the CADthinkers emphasized helping others with their design. Additionally, the students created an incognito hose system within the park, in which water periodically sprayed and flooded the park to push all outlying trash into a centralized drainage system, represented by a “black hole,” as referred to by our students, embedded into the middle of the park.

Real-World Relevance

As a lesson prompt, the students learned about the current issue of hostile architecture and pollution in urban spaces to design for. Hostile architecture, in which public spaces are made deliberately uncomfortable/unwelcoming to prevent homeless residents to loiter, has been a common theme among the public amenities of New York City, London, D.C., causing the lack of shelter and displacement of many homeless individuals. The students learned about the difficult lives many of these individuals endure within the urban, overpriced cityscape of New York, and how hostile architecture further displaces their lives. The students learned specifically about some of the most prominent examples of hostile architecture in New York as well, from benches, to entire parks like the Highline and Zuccotti Parks. In addition to hostile architecture, the CADthinkers also learned about the ongoing issue of pollution in urban spaces, and the importance of urban green spaces to improve population health and life expectancy. All in all, the students gained valuable insight into the issues regarding urban areas, and had significant encouragement to begin being a part of the solution.

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Note: CADthinkers' lessons are crafted for educational purposes, suitable for young children, and intended to instill empathy and motivation to address these issues. Please take time to learn about the current global challenges yourself, and contribute if you can.

Notable Observations

The CADthinkers students were extremely excited for this week's lesson. Despite just having one lesson prior, the students were impatient to see their 3D designs from the last week, their own Superhero of the Environment. The students were relentlessly passionate to learn the next ways to create more complex 3D structures. When learning about TinkerCADs free-hand drawing tool, which allowed them to create organic 3D shapes within their design, the students were eager to get their hands on the computer. By creating their own squiggly, questionably-safe ladder for homeless residents to go to the public treehouse, the CADthinkers felt accomplished in their creation, and continuously made efforts to create organic shapes for other parts of the design, such as the hose system. The students had a natural inclination to repetitively practice their newly learned skill with insistent reverence, trying out every keyboard shortcut taught to them until they could do it flawlessly, and making consistently cleaner designs in each trial.

Looking Forward

For future lessons, the CADthinkers program will continue focusing on 3D design aspects and incorporating design techniques to create solutions to real-world problems. Using TinkerCAD software, students will learn how to code through blocks and expand their knowledge to simple circuit building. Next lesson, CADthinkers will continue to research social issues relating to urban city planning and create designs to bring light to and prevent global issues. 

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