Digital Fabrication Day#4: Kissing the Cube

In the Digital Fabrication course, we are in the middle of a sea, full of technical details, and students need motivation. This is why I felt I should do something simple and educational but funny at the same time; a “kissing the cube” exercise. The planned exercise was about programming the robot to touch every facet of a cube without colliding with it. Of course, we couldn’t manage to kiss all the facets due to the limitation of the robot’s axes. However, most of the students were using Grasshopper for the first time. We only used manual input of plane using right-click “Set Plane” method.

It was an interesting challenge for students to think and decide on the motion path while learning how to do it in Grasshopper and Robots addon. Finally, below is an animation of what we did today;

You can Grasshopper code here:

We are using the Robots add-on for this exercise. There were links to the add-on’s download site in the previous post about the Digital Fabrication course. I think there are lots of interesting exercises that we could develop about the control of the robot arm. It will be serious pedagogical research on how the teachers who will work on this subject in the future will approach the architecture students and how they will handle the subject. Thus, it seems that this research of my generation with coding languages will continue with many different technologies in the next generation.