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.

Activity: Mindful Patterns for Peace

By Glowforge

In this activity, students will practice self-regulation and self-awareness by printing and assembling their own meditative puzzles. By concentrating on the designs and patterns in the puzzle, students learn compassion, patience, and focus. Have students create as many combinations as possible, or give students patterns to recreate with the puzzle pieces.

Activity: Classroom Garden Planters

By Glowforge

Brighten up your school with printed Windowsill Planters! In this activity, students will print, and assemble mini gardens that they can distribute throughout their school. Students can fill the planters with herbs, flowers, or vegetable seeds to learn how different plants grow, while also brightening their classrooms by sharing plants with the entire school.

Activity: Mindful Patterns for Peace

By Glowforge

In this activity, students will practice self-regulation and self-awareness by printing and assembling their own meditative puzzles. By concentrating on the designs and patterns in the puzzle, students learn compassion, patience, and focus. Have students create as many combinations as possible, or give students patterns to recreate with the puzzle pieces.

Activity: Tiny Homes Challenge

By Glowforge

Show your students that they have the power to shape and create their world. In this activity, students will put their architectural and engineering skills to the test by designing an efficient Tiny Home that incorporates their knowledge of energy demands, light sources, and housing must-haves.

Activity: R3Design Studio (Repair, Repurpose, Recycle)

By Glowforge

This activity teaches students to consider their carbon footprint in a community-minded way. They’ll examine several Glowforge prints to identify the types of mechanisms and techniques used in the designs. Students will then modify these designs to create a new version that incorporates a broken or unused item. This customized design should solve a need in the students’ community. They’ll identify this need, design a solution using their found item, build a prototype, and customize their solutions while rescuing objects from disposal!

Activity: Hexagonal Thinking

By Glowforge

Empower students to visualize their thinking. In this activity, students can explore complex concepts by creating a Hexagonal Thinking model. This activity allows students to visualize their thinking by linking elements together and creating a map of their thought processes. Make the pieces reusable by printing the shapes in acrylic and labeling them with dry erase markers!

Activity: Giving Wheel

By Glowforge

Empower your students to give back to their community! Print the spinning wheel decision maker and have students brainstorm ways they can make a difference. Fill in the spaces with ideas like a canned food drive, writing letters to local veterans, or donating children’s books to the local shelter.. Spin the Giving Wheel, see where it lands, and create a plan to give back to the community!

Activity: Operation Organization

By Glowforge

In this activity, students work collaboratively to design and print storage containers that help concession stands use their space more efficiently in order to prioritize organization and stock rotation. The focus is on a concession stand or a fundraiser but the organizational fun doesn't have to stop there! Students can use these designs to help organize other spaces in the school, like lockers, the school store, offices, or even theater arts and music spaces.

Activity: Play It Loud

By Glowforge

Soundwaves are all around us! In this activity, students explore how different materials can be used to amplify everything from a voice to a cell phone speaker. Students can customize the Retro Boombox Phone Amp design to accommodate their cell phone and make an amplifier that looks and sounds great.

Activity: Headphone Stashers

By Glowforge

Create a handy organizational tool with personality! Whether you’re playing a review game, listening to class lectures and audiobooks, or watching a review video before a test, headphones are a versatile learning tool inside and outside of the classroom. Use the Headphone Stashers to keep everything in place and organized when not in use. In this activity, students will learn the basics of Design Thinking as they create custom Headphone Stashers for around the school.

Activity: Noticing Patterns

By Glowforge

The spiral drawing set is more than just a fun art tool – it can be used to demonstrate and create mathematical patterns. Use this spiral drawing set to teach curves, radius, least common multiple (LCM), and radial symmetry in math, biology, and art! In this activity, students will make spiral drawings, recognize patterns, and find reflections and symmetry.

Activity: Assembly Instruction Designers

By Glowforge

How do simple machines make things move? Gears and driveshafts make a propeller move in this design. Give this 3D helicopter model to your students without assembly instructions and challenge teams to work together to figure out how the helicopter works and then create sequential written instructions for its assembly!

Activity: Customized Games

By Glowforge

Engaging games have the power to make learning fun! Games can help students increase their knowledge and engage in critical thinking while fostering social and emotional learning. While game types vary significantly from classic dice board games to more complex strategy or building games, all games have skills students can use to strengthen their learning. In this activity, students take game design to the next level as they create their own game that demonstrates their understanding of a topic, unit, or course of study!

Activity: Be Here: Now & Then

By Glowforge

Learning history through a local lens can be an engaging and powerful way to study the past. In this activity, students will explore their community through the history of local landmarks, parks, historical buildings, traditional festivals, or events and design a customized Now and Then frame. This activity not only creates a historical marker, but encourages students to appreciate their community’s history.

Activity: Animated Servo Motor Robot

By Glowforge

It’s alive!! Channel your inner Dr. Frankenstein while building your very own robot. In this lesson, students will combine the Glowforge App’s amazing design functions with the simplicity of micro:bit coding to create and program their own motorized robots.

Activity: Balance Scale

By Glowforge

What tips the scales? Being able to compare weight and size is a useful skill in identifying the largest piece of pizza, determining how much soil to add to a gardening experiment, or the right amount of flour when baking a cake. In this activity, students will build and use a balance scale to compare the size and weight of common classroom objects.

Activity: Illuminated Solar System

By Glowforge

3…2…1….Blastoff! In this activity, students will explore space by building their own Illuminated Solar System using the Glowforge App’s Trace and Print tool.

Activity: Shadow Puppet Theater

By Glowforge

Students work collaboratively to create and write a shadow play, and design their puppets and props. While working together on this engaging storytelling activity, students demonstrate social and emotional skills such as self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision making, social awareness, and relationship skills. Break a leg!

Mirror Light Reflection

By Glowforge

Learn the rule governing the angle at which light reflects from a mirrored surface and conduct experiments to verify it under different conditions. Observe the way in which multiple mirrors generate multiple reflections of the same object. Experiment with the placement of multiple mirrors to observe changes in the display of the reflections

Activity: Penny Plinko

By Glowforge

That’s so random. By definition, the outcome of a random event is impossible to know in advance. However, if a random process is repeated often enough, predictable patterns will emerge. In this lesson, students use a tabletop version of the old carnival game, Penny Plinko, to explore patterns in repeated random events. The crazy zig-zag motion of a penny wending its way to the bottom makes Penny Plinko a good way to learn about probability.

Activity: Step-by-Step Tracker

By Glowforge

Are you ready to take on the 10,000 step challenge? In this activity, students program a micro:bit – a kind of tiny computer – to create a wearable step counter that measures their activity throughout the day. They use the Glowforge app to customize a leather carrying pouch for the step counter to take it with them wherever they go.

Mirror Light Reflection

By Glowforge

Learn the rule governing the angle at which light reflects from a mirrored surface and conduct experiments to verify it under different conditions. Observe the way in which multiple mirrors generate multiple reflections of the same object. Experiment with the placement of multiple mirrors to observe changes in the display of the reflections

Lesson: Fairy Light Illuminated Banner

By Glowforge

In this lesson, students will: In this lesson, students will design and draw a series of pictures and use the Glowforge App Trace feature to etch them onto acrylic ornaments. Once printed, the ornaments will be attached to the LEDs on a fairy light string, illuminating students’ artwork with a lovely ethereal glow.

Lesson: Spinning Tops

By Glowforge

Spinning tops have been around for quite some time; like, a really really really long time. They’re typically simple in their design, and make great examples of how inertia affects all moving objects. Students will use their Magical Things Design Journal to help them complete the following design problem: Create a unique spinning top and work to earn as many stars as possible.

Lesson: Magical Things Journal

By Glowforge

In this lesson, students will:

learn the Design Cycle.
design a custom cover for their journals
engrave their custom designs on the approved materials

Lesson: Illuminated Cuff Bracelet

By Glowforge

In this lesson, students will: Humans have used weaving techniques to make tools and clothing for thousands of years. In this lesson, students will adapt this ancient art to create a very modern illuminated bracelet with a colorful fairy light strand woven through a leather cuff.