Making Vanilla Ice Cream From Scratch [MakerID-32]

Our project for the Black Pine Circle Maker Fair was to make homemade ice cream. The inspiration to take on the endeavor came about when we realized that the ice cream store we usually go to keep driving up their prices. We realized that making our own ice cream would be cheaper, and we could have fun while doing it, instead of going out and purchasing ice cream. We researched the different ways in which to make homemade ice cream, and found that it could be made with household materials.

We have all had the experience of paying too much for food that we knew we could make at home. Well now add ice cream to that roster. Whenever we crave the creamy goodness of ice cream, we hit up the nearest store, and buy a couple of scoops, or go to the grocery store, and buy a pint. Well here’s a secret big ice cream stores have been keeping from us. We can make ice cream ourselves. Why would you ever want to buy ice cream, when you can make it at home, and here’s the surprising part, you can make ice cream in 10 minutes. While this might seem ridiculous, my partner and I were able to discover a way in which to make ice cream in a Ziploc bag. We formulated the different ways in which to make ice cream before doing any research on the recipe, and discovered the most efficient, and cheapest way to make ice cream.

The cheapest and most effective way to make homemade ice cream is as shown. In a small Ziploc bag, combine half-and-half milk, sugar and vanilla extract. Push out excess air and seal Ziploc bag. In a second larger Ziploc bag, combine ice and salt, and place small bag inside the bigger bag and shake vigorously for 7 to 10 minutes. When the ice cream has hardened remove from bag and enjoy with your favorite ice cream toppings.

While making our first batch of ice cream we ran into some problems. The Ziploc bag which contained the ingredients for the ice cream slowly began to wear and tear. We noticed some of the holes that were forming in the bag, and did our best to patch them up with duct tape, but in the end the project was not successful. But, don’t let our failure deter you from making your own ice cream. We found out that the bag we were using was faulty, and had taken precautions no to make the same mistake in our future tests we suggest buying freezer Ziploc bags, as they will be harder to break.

 We learned that eating homemade foods is usually much cheaper than eating at a restaurant or buying processed foods from the market. I know getting processed or ready made foods are a quick solution, but it is unhealthy and expensive reality, many times it can be much faster to cook something at home, especially when you plan ahead. If we had more time in the maker fair we would have set up a station, and hand out ice cream to the people that viewed our project. Our advice would be that you might enjoy the experience of cooking your own dessert, such as ice cream

We were able to find our method for making ice cream with this website. And the approximate cost of this project was $11.80

0% plastic flashlight [MakerID-30]

        Wassup people! I'm Linda. :D  For our 2018 school Maker Faire, I decided to make a plastic free flashlight using Chibitronics. I decided to make this because I have noticed that there was a lot of waste of oil. According to Business Insider, it take about 714000000 gallons of oil to make plastic water bottles each year. Out of 30 billion plastic water bottles in the US (in 2005), only 12 percent were recycled. Which leaves 25 billion water bottles ending up in landfills, incinerated or littered. And that's only water bottles, I mean like what about everything else that we use which are made out of plastic? So I decided to make plastic free flashlights to reduce the use of plastic. I thought that if I did this, it would be great because people could learn to make it themselves, and no longer worry about things ranging from global warming (I mean you would have to worry about it, but not really about making it worse.) to not having the design of flashlight that you like. I first had started out with a branch, but then i decided that a branch was not durable enough so I switched to using a salt container. I had cut off the top part so i could put all the ugly looking duct tape and copper tape and other stuff inside to hide it. The main criteria is to use the least amount of material as possible. then it's too make it portable and easy to carry. I had made a prototype with the tree branch first. It worked well, just that the connection is really unstable. Like if you tilt the battery to the side a little bit, the light would start to flicker. I had overcomes this problem with a little help from my classmates, and rechecking the connection. I learned that putting duct tape on when the circus connection is bad isn't always useful. So far I am still working on the switch for the light, which would conserve a lot of energy. If you are like me and want to do this project at home, consider not peeling the back of the copper tape until you need it or else it won't stick and the connection will therefore be bad. 

Estimated cost: $30 - $38 
Link to tutorial on how to make Chibitronic light switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx9DRwNP3P0 


        

Chibitronics Flower [MakerID-14]

Hi we are Ellie, Maya, and Zahava, and our Maker Faire Project was to make a chibitronics flower. We wanted to do this project to teach people about interactive art. Art is not just looking at paintings that are by famous artists, it can be in many other unexpected styles as well. Our inspiration for this project, was a short video Ms.Mytko showed us of an interactive flower painting. We all liked the idea and decided to do something similar to it. At first we started with the templates in a directions book. Once we figured out what effects we needed, we tried making our own circuits, many of them did not work, we do not know why. We kept redesigning them, until eventually most of them worked. We were making a microcontroller circuit with a template, and we kept putting the the battery in, but it would never work. Eventually we got so desperate, that we just started pushing on random places, then suddenly for a second the lights lit up! We didn’t know what we did to get them to light up, so this time we pushed on things again, but slowly and strategically. This made us realize that we might not be able to get all of the details from our original design in, so we made our first step with the major part of the project.


We learned from this project that you just have to keep trying and persevering until you get it right. Even if something doesn’t work at first, that doesn’t mean that it won’t work at all. We also learned that it helps a lot to break things down and to start with the essential parts of the project, so if it doesn’t work, you aren’t stuck with something that will make the project seem unfinished. If we had more time, we probably would have tried to finish the part of the project with the sensors so that it was more interactive. We were originally going to use a sensor so that if you blew on the sensor, it would make the lights light up in a way that made it look like scattering dandelion seeds. But we ended up not having enough time to figure out how to do it, so we stuck with the basic plan. Some advice for other people doing chibitronics: definitely don’t give up, because there are many small errors that can happen that you have to watch out for. Another tip is to have a backup plan in case your original plan doesn’t work, which is likely to happen. Chibitronics doesn’t always work out the way you think it will, so it’s good to have something else to resort to if it doesn’t work out how you thought it would.We had to do many tries to get our project to work. We never knew what would happen. We didn't have to buy anything for our  project we used what was we had in the science room. This project taught us so much and we are so happy we did it, it was such a good experience and even though we didn’t get the original plan we wanted to, we got something out of it. 


 

Sketchbook $10

Circuit Stickers (White) Classroom $110.00

Circuit Stickers Effects Add-On $20.00

Chibi Stencil $5.00

Copper Tape $8.00

Total Price $153.00

A link that helped us: http://chibitronics.com