Creativity Lab sign

This upcoming school year I will be at Rocklin high school teaching Video Production but splitting my time between my classroom and a computer lab. This lab is being re-purposed; the computers and tables are being being taken out plus new furniture and a chromebook cart is coming in. I am hoping to do a little more by changing the feel and purpose of the room by re-branding it as the "Creativity Lab" I've been reading books like Space, listening to podcasts, watching webinars from Demco, and following the incredible shareouts on the #CUEBOLD hashtag. All of these have got my wheels spinning on what to do with this space. As you can see below... its a bit of an blank palette to work with. So my first thought was.... "it needs a name... and that name needs a sign!"

Step One: Design your title and trace it on Styrofoam. 

•  I found a large display font and wrote the words in Google Drawing. 
• Then, from Lowe's I purchased a sheet of Insulfoam.
• Then I pulled out an old projector, propped up the foam had to adjust the distance to make the words fit the length of the foam
• Lastly, we used a ruler and pen to trace the letters

Step Two: Cut out the letters

•  At this point take your project outside... you'll be burning that styrofoam!
• Get yourself a "hot knife" , which will let you easily carve out these letters.
• We used a wood ruler to help guide the straight lines and free handed the rest
• Afterwards we used sandpaper to smooth out the edges

Step Three: Cover

•  Here is where you get creative
• You can paint these or cover them with different materials
• If you will paint, I found using acrylic paint and foam brush the best. Avoid spray paint as the propellant will melt the Styrofoam. I painted the sides black to create a drop shadow effect

• If you would like to cover it with materials, then pull out your glue gun and think about the theme of your space. For my space, I wanted the focus to be about tools students can use to "create things", so this lead me to the techie and non-technie materials you can see here.
• Here are the materials I used and some of the lessons I learned. 
  • Rulers (easy to cut and cheap to buy in bulk)
  • Lego (they hold their value so they're not cheap! I asked my classes for donations and several families helped out)
  • Nails and screws (clean out the drawers in your garage)
  • Merge cube (saw another teacher who did this with her Maker Space sign and then found this printable version courtesy of Jamie Donnaly - the ARVRinEDU master)
  • Gears (searched for gears and Steam Punk accessories on Amazon. I thought these would be much larger though, so I'll still be on the lookout for a few big ones still)
  • Colored Pencils (had plenty of these in my teachers storage)
  • Film (I used old negatives of mine, but made double sure that I had these scanned ahead of time)
  • Blueprints (I tried asking around for friends who had blue prints, but then I realized... "I'll just print some ones I found on the web)
  • Keyboard keys (Checked with our computer tech if our tech department had old keyboards scheduled for E-Waste and he had several. You can check your local goodwill as well. I did have to search for a white keyboard to create the mosaic look. This letter took the longest to make. It wasn't the popping the keys off the keyboard which took time; it was holding them on after gluing them on the letter which took awhile)
  • Motherboard (again I went to our tech department and asked for old computers. I pulled these motherboards out and then had to cut them which wasn't easy) 
  • Computer code (easy to find examples on the web)
  • Circuitry (this wasn't planned, but as we were taking apart the keyboards we saw this plastic sheets and thought they would be perfect. 
• Of my three steps this was the most time instensive but also the most creative and fun

Finally, here is how my letters turned out. I was beyond happy with how they turned out and very appreciative of all the help my family and friends gave in this project. 

Lastly, you mount these on your wall and since they are foam its so easy to just put in some screws or hooks and then push the letters onto them. 

If this got you inspired to create your own please share back your creations!