*music playing*
Who would have imagined you could build a huge planetarium out of cardboard but
that's exactly what we did. Jenny Combs, a math teacher at the same
school where I teach, we decided to challenge our students to build a huge
dome that we could then turn into a planetarium. The geometry students spent
a month figuring out the best dimension and the sizes on these scale models and
this is the scale model that they came up with. It looks rather complicated but
it's just made out of two different sizes of triangles. We've got a series of
pentagon's and we got a series of hexagons. So the pentagon's have three
sides. Two sides are "A" length, you can see it here, and one side is the "B" length you
can see it here. And then we've got the hexagons now the hexagons have the B
side which is the same as the B side on the other triangles but then it's got
the two C sides so this makes a larger different dimension hexagon. Now to cut
these out we had long sheets of cardboard that are white on one side and
then I found these straight edges and we literally had the students taking knives
which seemed dangerous but it worked out, cutting these things to shape. And then
we've left a tab on the end there so that they'll bend up I'll show you why
in a second. Now we didn't want the dome just sitting on the floor we wanted to
be able to fit a chair in there and fit the projector in there so we added this
skirting at the bottom, you can see the dimensions here. That allowed us even to
fit a chair inside of there so that people could sit comfortably or people
could lay around on the ground. Now one of the things we also decided was to
attach these skirting pieces together with this spacer that added more support
and it allowed us, because all of our dimensions weren't perfect, it allowed us
to sort of spread this out. How did we get all these together? We lifted the
tabs up and drilled a hole right through. And then everything on this whole thing
is held together by these magical box rivets that I found. I'll put the link on
my web page so you can find them or down in the description and they're just
these nylon that go pop up up and they rip it together, you pull them apart and
they come apart, so you can take it apart every year and put it back together. And,
this is what it looks like on the inside it's so cool it's 16 feet wide so it's
enormous you can fit a class of 30 inside of here and these are high school
kids and it's ten feet tall. There's no claustrophobia there's
nothing it's just absolutely beautiful inside. Now remember I wanted this to be
a planetarium so I had to come up with some way to put a projector in there and
we couldn't afford a fancy one so I started experimenting and here's what I
came up with. I bought these super cheap cheap stands and over the course of a
month I I cut and figured out dimensions you could see them popping up on the
screen and this is what we came up with. All right so, this is the stand that's
going to hold the projector you'll see it in a moment
and then this is the one that's going to hold the mirror dome that's going to
reflect the image up onto the inside of the white surface of our geodesic dome.
Now here's the mirror dome, I got this from a custodial supply store, and it's
just curved so it's convex on the outside here nice and highly polished
and then there are several different sizes I decided to go with the one that
was ten inches tall and 19 inches wide now that's counting that outside rim
there. And then this sets right on top of the mirror dome stand and this one had
hooks this is how they attach it to the wall and they hooked on perfect on the
stand so that this thing wouldn't move around boy when you get your projector
all set up you don't want it moving around when it gets bumped falling off
of there. And when you get inside the dome this is what it looks like all put
together. So we've got our projector stand here and then you gotta have
speakers with a good subwoofer and then you've got the mirror dome on top of
that now you have to, depending on the throw length of the image length, and the
focal length and everything else if your projector, you'll have to move that back
and forth but you'll find the magic spot the better the projector the better the
image.
And then you've got yourself an immersive environment.
*music*
You know, literally thousands of students have been able to come and be inside that
dome and be inspired by science and technology and engineering and
mathematics and it's been a really really incredible experience we've been
building this thing since 2009 and every year we patch it up and we set it back
up again and this is one of the things I love about science. You can see some of
the other things I love about science they're popping up all around me on the
screen and I hope that this inspires you to go big or go home!