Tu b’shevat - the trees and shabbat project

Shevat and Shabbat

Tu b’ Shevat is the celebration of trees…because Spring is coming. We used the laser cutting skills we learned last week in “the Brick Wall Project” that taught us “kerf”. Kerf is the amount of wood that gets burned away in the laser cutting process. We learned that if we want to make slots that are an exact fit (aka “press fit”) for our 3mm wood, we need to account for kerf when we draw our slot. In our Trotec 100 at the middle school, we’re losing about .1 mm on each side of the slot, so if our piece of wood is 2.9 mm….well, you get the picture. There was a little bit of math that had to happen here, plus! the use of a caliper to measure the wood because each piece of wood is not necessarily like the others.

And learning how to use the laser cutter on fabric

Something that was new to us in this project is cutting on fabric. It has a tendency to want to blow away when the fans come on in the laser cutter.

We learned about fabric weights and a judicious use of blue tape.

And Design thinking

In this project, as in all others, we practiced our Design Thinking skills by beginning the process by interviewing “the users”…in this case, family members. The big question was “tell a story about the importance of Shabbat” and it was my hope that students would interview multiple generations of family members to see how their stories could be integrated into a “family message of Shabbat”.

We got some beautiful trees with messages of Shabbat from this project.