How to Build Almost Anything - Fall 2015

Courseware and student content from "How to Build Almost Anything" course at Metropolitan Community College's FabLab in Omaha, NE.

About the class

"How to Build Almost Anything" is an 11-week course offered through the FabLab at the Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, NE, USA. This particular class was taught on Wednesday evenings from 6PM to 9:40PM, and is therefore structured as an intensive lecture and project-based experience.

Although each session individually is intended to be relatively fast-paced and highly focused, it is not the intent of this class to train students to become deeply knowledegable "power users" in any of the topics discussed. Instead, this class is meant to introduce novices, often with zero exposure to digital fabrication technology, to the fundamentals of a variety of topics with the goal that motivated students who become interested in any particular topic are equipped well enough with knowledge to be able to interface with experts and perform their own indepedent research with less frustration and confusion.

With this in mind, the content of this course is intended to be implemented in a heavily project-based, experiential and hands-on format with minimal use of traditional classroom lecturing and Powerpoint presentations. Because every topic in this course requires self-driven exploration and hands-on experience, it should be the goal of the facilitator of this content to keep the students active, engaged and curious through any means necessary.

Materials included

• Syllabus containing a tentative schedule, along with lots of generic institution-specific information
• Instructor guides organized by week, intended to be used by the instructor to keep the class sessions on track and to cover all the basics of each topic
• Handouts and support material for relevant topics, located in various weeks' folders

License and usage

All of the content for this course is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, which means you are free to use and remix the content so long as you provide reasonable attribution and do not pursue commercial for-profit ventures with the content.

DO

• Use any part of this repository to develop or inform your own teaching practice
• Share this content with your colleagues and students
• Expand upon and contribute back to this repository if you use it!

DO NOT

• Use this content to make money. Small workshops are OK, but publishing this content in a book (without permission) is not cool.
• Use and/or share this content without reasonable attribution to myself and (if you're really nice) MCC's FabLab.
• Change the license of the content, regardless of how much you have adapted it.