The four-step digital fabrication process includes
designing, printing, fabricating, and assembling.
observed a variety of paper sculptures,
pop-ups, and origami on my desk at the
university. As a seventh grade English
language arts teacher at a low-income
urban school, Stiger was looking for
some fresh teaching projects and asked
if I wanted to help her use pop-ups
to teach creative writing. She had no
budget but a strong desire to provide
students with creative opportunities. I
immediately agreed to help.
We set up an after-school program
called the Digital Paper Engineering
Club at Spring Woods Middle School
in Houston, Texas, USA. The program was open to all students in sixth
through eighth grades. We ended up
with 10 students of varying backgrounds, interests, and personalities.
I led the initial skill-building lessons—covering paper engineering
basics and the digital fabrication
process—which Stiger built on to create an English language arts–infused
artistic experience.
Constructivist learning served as a
guiding factor for how Stiger facilitated the after-school program. We
believe that knowledge is constructed
through a learner’s active engagement
with quality educational experiences,
the freedom to make personally
meaningful artifacts while learning
by doing, and opportunities for social
interactions. Students deserve the op-
portunity to touch and feel their way
to an educational epiphany.
Making Meaningful Pop-Ups
Stiger was aware that students might
be intimidated by the prospect of creating pop-ups using the digital fabrication process. With that in mind,
she used a variety of constructivist instructional strategies to ease students
into discovering, exploring, and learning the digital fabrication process. She:
• Chose themes linked to student
interests
• Allowed students to explore,
discover, and construct meaning
using hands-on exploration through
scaffolded skills and modeling
• Facilitated social interaction,
student-as-teacher opportunities,
and collaboration to help students
brainstorm ideas and solutions
• Assigned students to maintain reflec-
tive journals, which prompted them
to consider what they had learned
and what they needed to expand on
• Had students create meaningful
physical artifacts so they would
have a personal connection and
apply their understanding
Though proficient in English,
most of the students were not native
speakers, so the challenge of adding
meaningful messages to their pop-up
creations left some students timid.
Stiger dealt with this by integrating
language arts concepts, such as dis-
cussing tone, critical analysis, char-
acter analysis, characterization, flow,
and continuity. Stiger maintained a
thought-provoking environment for
individualized literacy learning. Stu-
dents felt safe to express themselves
through the communication using
both visuals and verbal language.
A Collaborative Pop-Up Book
Bruce Foster, a local professional
paper engineer, spoke to the students
about the creation process and the
realities of the collaborative bookmaking design process. Stiger then assigned students to design and create a
two-page spread where they displayed
a poem with a pop-up illustration.
Each spread would become part of a
single book completed by the class.
With Stiger’s guidance, students
first analyzed their poems for characterization and emphasis. Then they
sketched thumbnails on scratch paper
to represent their designs. As a group,
they analyzed each poem to derive
some semblance of a whole, so the
book would flow naturally.
Students generated mock-ups of
their pop-up designs, also referred to
as “rough-cut dummies,” by hand or
using the digital fabrication process
to hypothesize and test functionality
as well as to determine final materials needed. During this phase, a great
deal of collaborative communication
took place as students shared and reflected on each other’s ideas.
