The Waring Industrial Park, or WIP for short, is a makerspace on Waring’s campus. The space is full of 3D printers, computers with CAD software, woodworking tools, sewing machines, and much, much more. It’s a space for exploration, collaboration, and creativity.
Learn more about Waring's world-leading FIRST LEGO League team. The student-made video tells the story of the Brickwolves, from their "Into Orbit" state tournament win in 2018 to their 680-point, world-leading "City Shaper" robot in 2020. This video contains the team's favorite and most memorable moments as well as their biggest and coolest breakthroughs in both the project and robot game.
First Lego League
Waring has both a Varsity and a Junior Varsity FIRST LEGO League team, with 15 students from Core through Group 2. In December, the Waring Varsity FLL team won the Eastern Massachusetts FLL Tournament to advance to the World Championship for the second consecutive year. The team's outstanding accomplishments have been featured in The Boston Globe and The Salem News as well as in articles published on the Carbon Leadership Forum and Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Academy blog. The team is coached by Francis Schaeffer and Sarah Carlson-Lier.
The WIP Student Committee, which meets every few weeks and initiates a range of student-led programming during Focus/Flex and lunch periods, recently organized the following workshops:
A workshop on transforming plastic bags into tote bags for the Sustainability Group
A 3D modeling and 3D printing workshop
A workshop on creating with LittleBits
A workshop on the Cricut machine
A workshop on building in Lego Digital designer
A workshop on building hand-planes out of wood
A speaker making workshop
STEM Course
Group 1 is taking a half year STEM class this year; half the students during the first semester, half during the second semester. The course focuses on technology based, small team, experiential learning. Their major project is designing and building a balloon powered car. The students are designing the cars in Fusion 360, a CAD software program, and then printing the parts on the school's 3D printers. The students are learning CAD skills, design skills, and group-work skills. They are learning how to break a project down into steps on their own, decide who is going to build what parts, make sure all the parts fit with each other, print the parts, and then actually build the cars.
Endterm
Last spring two Endterms used the WIP: the Boat Building Endterm and the Robotics Endterm. The Boat Building Endterm, led by John Wigglesworth, built a 14-foot dory as well as installed a large wooden counter around one side of the WIP, where the students sit and use computers. The Robotics Endterm programmed and built robots. This provided a chance for students to be introduced to many of the facilities available in the WIP, such as 3D modeling software, 3D printing, 2D cutting, and Lego EV3 Mindstorms robots.
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