MIDL goes to Rock Prairie Elementary School


Posted on Febryary 27, 2017 at 9:00 PM



This spring, Mixed-Initiative Design Lab (MIDL) introduced gesture-based virtual pottery and hand-held 3D printing to K4 students at Rock Prairie Elementary School on its second annual ‘Discovery Night’. The event, conducted on February 23, 2017, was meant to expose young minds to science through a wide variety of exhibits and interactions with Texas A&M faculty and students!


During the event, graduate students Umema and Ronak showcased zPots, a virtual pottery application developed by Dr. Vinayak who directs MIDL in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. The application allows novice users to create pottery simply by using their hand gestures and movements in mid-air.

The interactive display of colorful pots rotating on the screen immediately attracted several passers-by – both young and old! It took Umema and Ronak only minutes to demonstrate the app when most children confidently took charge of the screen waving their hands for shaping, deforming, and coloring the pots. While parents were busy creating refined pot-like shapes, the children expressed their creative instincts with some "crazy, whacky, and funky" pottery!


The pottery application was developed as a part of a research collaboration with ZeroUI, Cupertino-based startup. The research was supported by NSF Grants 1312167 and Grant 1243868

On the second table was the station for "makers". Ting-Ju, a PhD student at MIDL-MEEN-TAMU worked with children introducing them to the 3Doodler 3D printing pen. The gradual drying of the molten plastic being extruded from the 3Doodler was no barrier for children who patiently and with complete concentration, "sketched-out" little physical glasses, cars, guitars and flowers.