Glowing Pokémon Go Patches with EL Panels
Students combine art, gaming culture and engineering by fabricating light-up patches to increase youngsters’ visibility at night. The open-ended project is presented as a hypothetical design challenge: Students are engineers who have been asked by a group of parents whose children go out Pokémon hunting at night to create glowing patches that they adhere to clothing or backpacks to help vehicle drivers see the kids in the dark. Student pairs create Pokémon character stencil designs cut from iron-on fabric patches, adding transparent layers for color. Placed over an EL (electroluminescent) panel that is connected to a battery pack, the stencils create glowing designs. Each team creates a circuit, which includes lengthening the EL panel wiring to make it easier to wear. Then they sew/adhere the patches onto hoodies, messenger bags, hats, pockets or other applications they dream up. The project concludes with team presentations as if to an audience of project clients. Keep the project simple by hand cutting and ironing/sewing, or use cutting machines, laser cutters and sewing machines, if available.
Create a fun safety product—glowing Pokémon Go patches!Copyright 2016 SparkFun Education https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/pokmon-go-patches-with-el-panels
Engineering is essential to peoples’ health, happiness and safety. For example, some engineering projects improve public health, like sewer and sanitary infrastructure and water treatment plants. Some engineers work in the medical field to design replacement limbs and medical technology. Other engineers create GPS electronics that help emergency personal locate lost and injured hikers. In this fashion, like real-world engineers, students create devices that improve people’s safety at night by creating light-up patches for Pokémon Go players.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Use technology components (wire, battery, EL panel) to make a functioning project, including soldering.
- Define what electroluminescent (EL) patches are.
- Explain the components of a circuit with EL patches.
- Explain how engineers are essential to human safety.
- Demonstrate the interaction between engineering and the arts.