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Products that do what Exhibit and Site on Mechanisms for Students does

Just finished a super-nerdy amateur hobby project: An exhibit and website to show kids how cool mechanisms are! Sadly, kids don't get much tangible experience with machines anymore. Ideally, this exhibit will inspire some to explore engineering, even if they are not "book learners". The website provides content to back up the exhibit, with videos and 3D printing files. The project is inspired by engineering exhibits from the past. Check out the research page for more. The project will be open-sourced to enable people to make their own and extend it. If you want to collaborate, LMK. --Steve

  1. 1IM

    Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli

    2025

  2. 2IM
  3. 3IW

    Good math problems are hidden inside textbooks and online documents. To keep up with all the sources in the world is hard. For someone who just wants to continuously solve problems, finding and going through all the sources feels like a hassle. I wished for a website that could just dump all the math problems available in the world out there. And if I could filter the problems by topics, that would be beautiful. teachyourselfmath is a side project that was born out of this need. At its core, it is a math PDF extraction engine. The engine has some machine learning going on behind the scenes…

    2024 · teachyourselfmath.app

  4. 4LO

    Hello HN, Over the last 12 months, I have been building https://learnawesome.org This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_ The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos,…

    2020

  5. 5ID

    This post shows and explains the design of the eBike I built myself. I decided to post it on this specific forum because this is where it all started, by stumbling on another post, as mentioned in my entry.

    2022 · endless-sphere.com

  6. 6IP

    I started teaching my daughter physics by showing her how things actually work - plucking guitar strings to explain vibration, mixing paints to understand light, dropping objects to see gravity in action. She learned so much faster through hands-on exploration than through books or videos. That's when I realized: what if I could recreate these physical experiments as interactive simulations? Lumen is the result - an interactive physics playground covering sound, light, motion, life, and mechanics. Each module lets you manipulate variables in real-time and see/hear the results…

    Jan 2026 · projectlumen.app

  7. 7IB

    I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.

    2024 · lostpixels.io

  8. 8AS

    I’ve been working on a unique storybook designed to teach kids about how computers work, and I would love to get your feedback. Set 500 years in the future, the story follows two kids – one a robot, the other a human – as they explore the workings of what to them is ancient technology: our present-day computers. I’ve aimed to keep each story short and engaging, sprinkling in humor and illustrations to captivate young readers. As an open-source project, you’re also welcome to check out the source here: https://github.com/yong/lostlanguageofthemachines

    2024 · lostlanguageofthemachines.com

  9. 9

    Effective learning-by-doing for young innovators

    2019

  10. 10

    Learn to prototype for free

    2017

  11. 11IB

    2023 · github.com

  12. 12IM

    Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!

    2025 · muffinman.io

  13. 13
    Ivy129

    Publishing platform for interactive technical training

    2016

  14. 14

    A crowd-sourced library of Sketchbooks

    2014

  15. 15WF
  16. 16HS

    Hello HN! My name is Patrick, and I am a junior at my High School’s FRC robotics team FRC 341 “Miss Daisy” (yes named after the movie). Every year, during the first weekend in January, a new robotics game is released (no it’s not battlebots). The game could be about launching balls into a goal, climbing monkeybars, or placing cubes on a see-saw. This year we were challenged to build a robot that could shoot orange foam donuts into a goal about 6 feet in the air. Here is a yt video with the game animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9keeDyFxzY4&t. After we received the game…

    2024 · chiefdelphi.com

  17. 17

    A Tumblr for making your own textbooks

    2014

  18. 18
    Play-i84

    Teach kids to code with interactive toy robots

    2014

  19. 19

    Fun, expressive robots for learning code and electronics

    2017

  20. 20PI

    Hi all, not sure if there are any other parents / teachers out there, but I recently started collecting project ideas from around the web and decided to make a site so that other people could submit projects / project reports. It's nothing special, just trying to find good projects to do with my kids. If you have any good ideas I'd certainly appreciate you adding them. And if you try any of them out, it would be helpful if you let everyone else know how it went. It's called MakerParent (http://www.makerparent.com)

    2014

  21. 21HU

    Link here: http://beta.whatispolymath.com Despite all the educational material on the web, I found it pretty hard to learn how to code and design. I had trouble finding high-quality content, figuring out what to learn next, and staying motivated without easy ways to track my progress. So, my co-founder and I built Polymath. Our MVP is pretty simple right now: you can find & submit good content, bookmark & track your progress across different resources, and rate/comment on the material. We’re trying to build a really fun online learning community, and we’ve got some more cool features…

    2012

  22. 22

    Augmented reality toys for creative play

    2017

  23. 23AC

    I started to draw cartoons to make complex concepts in AI more accessible to the rest of us. Hope this is useful & lmk if you have ideas or feedback!

    2024 · ai-explained.yoko.dev

  24. 24OS

    I recently got into cycling and got interested in tracking my performance to improve my ride. I couldn't find an affordable bike computer that I could easily modify so I built my own. One thing lead to another and I found myself building an electronic derailleur. I thought others might be interested in doing the same so I wrote an instructable. Love to know what you think. If you like it please vote. http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Electronic-Derailleur/?ALLSTEPS The Arduino sketch, schematics, Fritzing diagram, bill of materials and CAD diagrams can be found on the project page…

    2012

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