NuVu Studio is a full-time innovation school for middle and high school students in Cambridge, MA. NuVu’s pedagogy is based on the architectural studio model, and within that framework, students work on multidisciplinary collaborative projects. Topics explored in NuVu studios include architecture, robotics, industrial design, interactive design, VR, AR, art, fashion, film, animation, and everything in between. We teach students how to navigate the messiness of the creative process, from inception to completion. Together, Ryan Nixon, an experimental physicist/engineer, and Anjali Patel, an architectural designer/researcher, support NuVu’s initiative at All Saints Academy as NuVu Fellows. Through All Saints’ Innovation Studio program, which is run as a required high school course, they collaborate between design technology, and work to reshape and rethink traditional education. Each semester, with support from NuVu staff, the Fellows lead sixteen studios, working with over two hundred students. The following projects are examples of prototypes created in the 20162017 school year.
James Eschrich | Nellda Clark In this studio, students worked in partnership with Harmony Village, a new residential development in Winter Haven, Florida, to increase harmonious living between pets and humans. These students focused on increasing pet independence, since when owners leave their dogs at home, the dogs are restricted to the boundaries of the home. With the development of Beam Me Home, dogs are now free to explore the community. A dog collar shows dogs the way home by pointing a laser in the direction the dog should walk. The collar draws upon a dog’s innate tendency to treat a laser pointer as his/her prey. When activated via a phone app, the collar sources walking directions via GPS to lead the dog safely home.
Cobe M.| Jack M. | James M. The Rolling Picnic Table is a multipurpose furniture piece designed to reinvent the experience of eating outside. Inspired by Japanese joinery and geometry these students have designed an overall system and figured out detailing on how this piece can be mass produced for the school premises. The table transforms into three states: table, transport, and bench. The students are currently experimenting with conduit as well as figuring out how to adjust their design based on the material change to ensure structural integrity of the piece.
Logan Giliam | Leo Li | Kasey Ray Community Bugs is a project that explored the mechanical movements of ants. These students were intrigued by how ants communicate with each other, specifically through chemical pheromone trails to tell their friends where to go to, find food, or defend the colony. To capture this idea, they designed a leader and follower robot. When the leader ant moves, it draws a line with a colored marker. The follower robot has a color sensor that reads the line, provoking a specific kind of following behavior linked to that color. Each robot is encased in a series of acrylic boxes so to expose their mechanical and electrical components to the viewer, and they are connected with custom 3D printed mounts.
Construction Diagram
Kamia Campbell | Lindsey Thayer AR Shoe Shopping will revolutionize shopping through augmented reality. In this project, each AR tracker is associated with a specific brand of shoe which holds countless styles that can be flipped through on your smart phone. As the shoe is projected below you can adjust size and style. This allows for a more realistic idea of what you are buying rather than your imagination. This device will bring online shopping closer to reality while still adhering to the constant change in trends.
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Tyler Kendrick | Monica Zhang Alternating Perspectives is an art piece that seeks to understand how different creatures view the world. Through coding within Processing and Arduino, this team paired a robot arm with different webcam filters to demonstrate how other organisms see. With a twist of the potentiometer, the user can see on a computer interface how four different creatures visually experience the world: humans, flies, snakes and birds. For instance, when the device is set to “snake�, the arm is positioned at a low height and oscillated left to right, using a blurred infrared filter to mimic how a snake sees.
Olivia Dunbar | Emily Foppe In this studio, students worked with an organization called Hearth, which aids homeless students in Polk County, Florida. Because of resource constraints, social workers only have enough time to visit each student in the program once per year. This is especially challenging for high school seniors who are making major life changing decisions, such as applying to colleges. CAPS or College Application Preparation for Students, is designed to help high schoolers organize and streamline the college application process in a simple and free way. Further, for at-risk students, the app works to help communicate application progress with their social worker.
Gavin Ma | Jake Smith Dragonfly came out of the Bugs studio, in which students researched the mechanical movements of insects. The students who created the Dragonfly researched the flying motion of dragonflies, which is quite similar to swimming. To capture and demonstrate this motion, they designed a large scale, hanging installation of a mechanical dragonfly. Using Theo Jansen’s linkages, the project uses one motor to control the four wings and another mechanism to lift the body up and down. Viewers can learn about the intricate mechanics that go into replicating nature, gaining a deeper appreciation for the natural world.
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Adrian Joyeux | Elise Leedy In the studio Musical Machines, students designed devices that change the way we perceive music. This project, Hearing Color, works to help the visually impaired understand the world around them through music. These students decided to explore this topic through the lens of music therapy, specifically focusing on assisting people who are visually impaired. They researched how sound and color wavelengths correlate with one another and created a device that shows the relationship between the two. The “wand� reinterprets the colors in a person’s environment as a specific sound, in essence, hearing color instead of seeing it.
Zongxi|Anuj | Britney | Alyssa In partnership with Publix Supermarkets, this studio sought to re-imagine the shopping cart. This group focused on ways to make grocery shopping more fun. Their idea was to create an AR projection game in which your shopping cart becomes a virtual Pacman. In order to gain points, shoppers have to navigate the supermarket with their “Pacman Carts”, trying to “eat” as many fruits (projections on the floor) as they can. To showcase the idea, the students in this group built a stand which held a computer, projector, webcam, and projected onto the surface below. Due to live feed and projection, they ended up creating an AR infinity mirror (pictured left).
Niel Li | Katie Miner In this studio, students explored animations on future transport. These students explored the possibility of a portal for their animation. They took a comical path in posing what it would be like if an alien popped up in a living room. This story highlights how we expect aliens to automatically know how to communicate with humans as soon as they arrive. The method of this story being told is one of hand-drawn frames made in FireAlpaca carefully stitched together with the editing software Adobe Premiere. Exploring the idea of portals, and explaining how they work, theoretically.
Order of Operations:
1. Dough is extruded via planetary gear and is placed in fryer.
2. Donut is picked up by claw and placed on lazy susan
3. Player strategically times pressing extruder buttons to put toppings on donut
4. Lazy susan rotates for shotgun phase
5. Player shoots sprinkle shotgun with foot power
6. Lazy susan rotates back, dumps donut onto ramp to dispense to player
Trevor Hallet | Mit Patel With Donut Arcade these students hoped to bring the physical to the virtual, instead of just having a reinforcement by mere points on a screen. The game allows you to customize a donut so that, at the end, you get a donut with or without toppings, based on your skill. A planetary gear system is used to extrude dough in the shape of a perfect circle into the fryer, a lazy susan gets donuts moving so that extruding glazes becomes a part of the game, and lastly a sprinkle gun blasts the final touches on the donut. The following are parts of the contraption which will be continued for Open Innovation.
Adrian Joyeux | Bailey Lariscy Fan Girls group sought to combat extreme heat known to Florida while also being fashionable. The piece is worn like a backpack which cools one’s back whilst ribbons decorate one’s outfit. The electronics include fan motors held by a laser cut structure, which are powered by hooking it up to an ESC, lipo alarms, and lipo batteries. A hexagonal netting was applied to the structure to protect hair from getting caught in the mechanism. The diagram above demonstrates how the wearable would interact with a person when worn. It was modeled during the annual Innovation Exhibition.
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Emma Cornejo | Jowana Ghazzawi Color Choreography was part of the Music Videos studio. The students focused on utilizing colors to emphasize choreography. They used color to express feelingover and they wanted to Color powder cascading dancer. replicate that for the song, “Forbidden Voices” by Martin Garrix. They identified certain points, such as beat drops, to make the choreography stand out. The powder paint serves as the antagonist. As powder paint is thrown on her, it messes with the dancer’s emotions, but she eventually overcomes it.
Film Still 4
Camren Meier Remix is an art installation that simulates the student’s interpretation of bipolar disorder in order to create awareness and empathy. It revolves around flooding light into a room, a metaphor for it being all encompassing yet constrained. Two lights alternate on and off to simulate the two stages of the disorder: manic and depressive. The lights shine through a custom cutout that influences the projection on the surrounding walls. The two lights are on rotating disks that resemble a DJ set. Since a DJ is the perfect metaphor for the disorder, seamlessly switching between records without a moments notice.
Abby Wu | Cindy Sun Swan Filter was in the Kinetic Sculpture studio, which partnered with Harmony Village. These students sought to create a sculpture which could clean up bodies of water without deterring animals from its cold mechanical exterior, like how standard filters are designed. They decided to create a mechanism that would resemble a swan as to fit more readily in its environment, cleaning the water without bothering creatures. They worked out a gear system which would create the movement of wings from one rotation point. The wings were then covered with white feathers to soften the mechanism.
Jacob F. | Paul M. | Fisher W. Food Taxi was in Open Innovation studio. Originally part of Hack the Cafeteria, these students created a line following robot to deliver food from the cafeteria kitchen to the tables in the lunch room. By doing this it decreases clutter in the lunch line making the process of getting food much faster. So that students have ample amount of time to sit down and enjoy their meals and talk with friend. Originally they thought of an excessive track system around the cafeteria but due to the lack of code compliance of the space they decided upon a scissor lift which would raise table height to deliver food.
Cassidy C. | Anna K.| Abigail R. Aquaponics was a part of the studio Hack the Cafeteria which sought to improve the on-site cafeteria. These students focused on how their cafeteria food is unhealthy and how there is a lack of education about adequate nutrition. Their solution was to create a closed-loop aquaponic system that provides healthy food options for students as well as educates them about the food growth ecosystems. Their system was equipped with custom LEDs, an Arduino, aquarium pump, custom built tank, and self sculpted grow towers. The grow towers were cut then heated to get a smooth undulation outward.