Educators Lessons | Glowforge

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Standard-Aligned Lessons for Educators

Save your energy and time for the classroom. Our lesson plans integrate into your curriculum and are ready-to-use at the click of a button.

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Roll the Dice

By Glowforge

Roll once! Roll twice! Share your thoughts! In this activity, students will use printed dice to engage in a quick, simple reflection exercise that will have everyone talking. Students will collaboratively create their own question sets to help others reflect, practice skills, and even review content.

Robotic Arm Helper

By Glowforge

Empower students to discover opportunities to make things more efficient and accessible for others. The Augmented Robotic Manipulator (A.R.M.) provides 18-inches of extra reach for grabbing all types of objects. In this activity, students build and explore the A.R.M., identify its uses within the community, and imagine opportunities to enhance the design for a specific purpose or need.

Making Connections

By Glowforge

Let’s get to know each other. Fostering opportunities for students to create deeper connections and trust in the classroom creates positive learning opportunities for all. In this activity, students create a classroom badge with adjectives and graphics to represent who they are. The identity badges are used to help facilitate conversations that help students make connections with their peers.

Social Masks

By Sara Rosenstock

or this project, each student will design a mask that represents their alter-ego or a mask that represents how they wish people perceived them. This mask can depict emotion, aspirations, as well as playfulness—the possibilities are not limited.

Geometric Animals

By Emily Hurst

Ready for a trip to the zoo? In this activity, students use what they know about geometric shapes to create a library from which students will build an animal.

Build an Aquarium Exhibit

By Cathy DeCampli

This lesson introduces students to their school library’s subscription databases as a tool for their research projects and a fun place to satisfy curiosity.

“Flat Stanley” Keychain

By Danesa Menge

What would it be like to be Flat Stanley? In this activity, students will develop design skills and empathy as they create their own version of the character.

Community Luminaries

By Glowforge

In this activity, students recognize local heroes and honor them with a luminary highlighting their community contributions.

Making Moves

By Glowforge

In this activity, students will identify and describe the phenomena of friction by using the Glowforge to print race cars and then conducting speed and distance trials to explore the effects of friction.

Imagination in 3D

By Glowforge

Story time! In this activity, students use their imaginations to create a fantastical character, write a story about them, and then act out their story for an audience.

Bucket Fillers (Pass it On!)

By Glowforge

Encouraging kindness can make a big difference in the community and culture of your school! In this activity, students consider a person or group whose bucket they’d like to fill with kindness. They use the Glowforge app to create a customized design for their bucket, then print, fill, and deliver these gestures of kindness to their recipients.

Customized Pegboards

By Glowforge

Square peg, round hole. In this activity, students will conduct empathy interviews with educators around the school to design and create the perfect pegboard accessories to remove clutter, improve workflow, and save them time. Students will use customized pegboard components to help organize the classroom, desks, and other places around the school.

Student Designed Awards

By Glowforge

How can you strengthen your school community? Recognizing the achievements and hard work of community members can foster a culture of care and pride. In this activity, students will customize an award to recognize someone’s hard work. This can be a classmate, a teacher, or perhaps an often-overlooked member of the school community, such as an administrative assistant, a member of the custodial staff, or a cafeteria worker. Grow a greater sense of unity by recognizing the achievements of those around you!

Multiuse Photo Booth Props

By Glowforge

Strike a pose and say cheese! Photo booth props help us find creative, silly, and unique ways to bond while taking photos with friends and classmates. With the Glowforge app, you can customize and create your own ready-to-use, fun photo booth props. Use these designs to create and capture magical moments in your classroom or school community!

Plant Propagation Station

By Glowforge

Watch your plants grow! The Glowforge and some kitchen scraps are all you need to watch the wonder of propagation while making a greener, healthier, and tastier classroom. Learn about root systems, observe how plants grow and change, and compare how different species develop over time.

Community Shadowbox Dioramas

By Glowforge

Every location has its own story. Empower students to tell their community’s story visually with Community Shadowbox Dioramas! In this activity, students create customized dioramas by adding artifacts, photos, or other mixed-media that capture their community’s values, history, and culture. Partner with a local historical society, town hall, civic organization, or library to display the finished dioramas.

Not-So-Scary Monsters

By Glowforge

Ahhh! Real Not-So-Scary Monsters are everywhere! In this activity, students roll dice to practice addition and create one-of-a-kind monsters and imagine what cool jobs they might do! Then, they use the Glowforge app’s Trace and Print tool to import, customize, and print their unique, Not-So-Scary creature.

My Life, My Mixtape

By Glowforge

Tell the story of your life through your favorite songs! Playlists are a great way to showcase the events and experiences that make you unique. In this activity, students curate their own playlists and create a customized design in the Glowforge app complete with a QR code to share the music that soundtracks their life.

See Through Gardening

By Glowforge

Plant bulbs are amazing containers! They store all the parts of a plant as well as the energy to help it grow when the conditions are just right! Can we trick a bulb into thinking it is time to bloom? In this activity, students customize a see-through planter to view how a bulb changes and grows as it blooms and conduct experiments based on the plant’s needs to produce different growing results.

Exploring the Miracle Hinge

By Glowforge

Scoring and cutting allows something rigid to bend, but how do you know how much to cut away to have it function the way you want it to? In this activity, students will explore the process that makes a flat material bend and become three dimensional! Using living hinge designs, students will evaluate the construction of a living hinge for its tolerances and possibilities.