Walkout Frog by DocCopemys

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

From April 2-16 2018 Oklahoma teachers “walked out” (it technically wasn’t a strike since it is illegal for public employees to strike here) of their classrooms to protest a number of issues surrounding education funding in the state. By adjusting our schedules my spouse and I were able to make sure that one of us was home with our five-year-old daughter (aka; "favorite-little-scientist"). During that time, we improvised a lot of STEAM based activities, of which the “Walkout Frog” was one.
After attending a lecture by a visiting scientist my daughter asked me what I had done at work that day to which I replied I saw a talk about frogs. She then suggested that we make a frog.
We used wadded-up paper and masking tape to create a simple armature for the basic form. We then covered it with a thin layer of polymer clay and I helped to sculpt in the details.
Once we cured the clay she painted it according to her own artistic vision.
After she painted it she announced that she wanted to make copies to give to her teachers once school started back up. So the next day she used my phone to take a large number of photographs and I helped her to load them into Agisoft Photoscan to build a photogrammetric model. After that I did the subsequent model processing.
Once we had the digital model sliced we took it to the maker space at the public library to print three copies. After they were printed, we worked to sand, glue, fill, and paint the printed copies. Upon returning to school she did give one to each of her teachers.
In the spirit of keeping the STEAM lessons going I told her that in science it is important to communicate and share your results and suggested that we share the model online so that people anywhere in the world can print their own copy. She immediately jumped on board with this idea. My hope is that if people do choose to print the “Walkout Frog” they will post it under “Makes” on Thingiverse or contact me via Twitter with a photo of the print, and let me know the city, state/province, and country they printed it in. We will then place a pin in a map mounted on foam board to add a geography component to this particular STEAM exercise.
I've posted both an uncut version, and the cut version I actually printed. The cut version will adhere nicely to the build plate and only requires minimum support for the eyes.