“3DP & Kids”: 3D-Printing Tech Will Advance STE(A)M Education, Enable Teachers & Foster 21st C. Skills

The NY3DP Summits Roundtable In Which Digital-Discipline Teachers, Art/Tech Academics & Educational-Technology Players Examine Why, How & What “Students” Should Be 3D Printing & DigiFabbing—Whether Those Learners Are Children Or Adults.

We entitled our third expert Roundtable—convoked on Wednesday, 25 September of our Summits‘ Week at the Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village—”3DP & Kids.”  Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School (LREI) were among the leaders of the progressive school movement in the City. As host of our Roundtable on this cutting-edge topic in Education Technology, LREI proves it is still expanding the boundaries of K-12 teaching.

The necessary short-hand of titles also foreshortens nuance. Additionally, our Roundtable discussed the 3DP and Digital Fabrication vectors that are driving perhaps the most important engine of this disruptive change-agent. That is 3DP’s ability to impart higher knowledge and creativity via hand-brain learning—or education by doing. (See LREI-host Mark Silberberg’s introductory comments—about what I might characterize as “eShop”—early in this Vlog’s video Part 1.)

Other new and applicable terms of art in action here are “visual thinking,” “spatial reasoning” and Project-Based Learning. Education—about and in deployment of change—underpins 3DP and DigiFab empowerment of everything else this new technology touches.

In putting this Roundtable together, 3DP Media enjoyed the professional help of two NYC educators who are steeped in the Ed-Tech sector—and leading the way in the educational practices around 3DP/DigiFab.

These two are first Saber Khan, our event MC and Roundtable Moderator. He is also Technology Teacher and Curriculum Integrator at Little Red School House (LREI). My middle-school teacher (Oakland, CA) son-in-law Rowan Driscoll introduced me to Saber—they were formally colleagues in a summer-program around innovative teaching disciplines at UC Berkeley—in July. Saber enthusiastically supported—and added to—our “3DP & Kids” Roundtable concepts, helped recruit session participants and convinced LREI administrators to deploy resources and host our event at their Elisabeth Irwin High School.

Secondly, Lizabeth Arum, who was former Education Coordinator for the Makerbot Foundation and is “Design Thinking” and Physical Computing teacher (via 3DP) at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn. She reached out to her very-extensive list of friends and colleagues in the segment. As a result, we enjoyed Liz—and a very powerful set of thought leaders and topic experts on our Roundtable. Our synergy-driving participants exchanged provocatively and innovatively on the widest implications and impresario-thinking around “3DP & Kids.”

Our expert Roundtablers discussed moderated-questions, sparked and investigated other promising educational vectors, shared field-tested concepts and solution-developed with audience input.

Come enjoy the compelling action via these links to our “3DP & Kids” videos: PART 1 and PART 2.

Dynamite stuff for the K-12 classroom. AND, for any educational environment where knowledge, training, how-to—and inspiration!—needs imparting. Think startup entrepreneurs, ramping-up small-business owners, workforce-redevelopment participants and local economic development organizations and their already-aggregated communities of small-business constituents.

C’mon Back!

LAND

 

 

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NeoBrooklyn: Capital of NanoFacturing? [Looking Back to Look Ahead...A Post Reprise]

[Past is Prologue...And Now We Know Much of the First Few Chapters of the Book of NeoBrooklyn; here's my post from 8 April 2010: three and a half years in 3DP is two generations and change...a lot of change...]

Brooklyn's Ur DIY Nanofacturer Bre Pettis on the cover of Make magazine with his MakerBot 3D-printer kit.

Brooklyn’s Ur DIY Nanofacturer Bre Pettis on the cover of Make magazine with his MakerBot 3D-printer kit.

Perhaps the story of making things in Brooklyn has come full circle: from kitchen table (18th C.) to kitchen table (21st C.). With the Industrial Revolution in-between. The first iteration might have used a few one-off hand tools. The second will surely use ICT to empower the hand/brain of the neo-maker…

 

Should, would, could NeoBrooklyn become the capital of Nanofacturing? 

OK. Stop me before I neologe again! Nanofacturing is my neologism (“new word:” hey, our world of the new needs fresh words to describe all our proliferating tech-driven novelty, no!) for DIY manufacturing in a garage. Or—in NeoBrooklyn’s case—desktop manufacturing on a kitchen table.

((OK. OK. I’m a pace too slow this time: Nanofacturing.com, the domain name, is taken! An irrefutable indicator that I’ve been beaten to it…tip of the hat to ESH Sciences Inc. Funny enough, they’re actually involved in nanotechnology—really, really small things—NOT “nanofacturing” as I define it.))

The Tech Imp slyly suggests it’s possible to nanofacture successfully in New Brooklyn. (Tech Imp? The Technological Imperative: all things digital are lighter, faster, smaller, cheaper and better over time. I explain this trope of mine so often, I may have to enshrine it in the footer of this site.)

In February [2010], Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of WIRED magazine (proclaimed “Magazine of the Decade” by AdWeek), delivered another of his cover articles that metamorphs into a meme…and then into the raison d’être of start-ups. This cover story was entitled “The New Industrial Revolution.” The cover page sub-title said it all: “The factory, the investors, the workers—obsolete. In the age of DIY manufacturing, all you need is a garage and a great idea.”

Thus, our NeoBrooklyn kitchen table: the new anvil of Borough manufacturing innovation! (Where do you think the 200K sole proprietors—an actual Brooklyn Economic Development Corporation stat—of NeoBrooklyn operate their one-person businesses?)

I know you’re guffawing at the Tech Imp here. But, she gets the last laugh. The NYTimes has published an article entitled “Geeks on a Train.”  This story tells how Brooklyn’s own DIY legend and Nanofacturing guru, Bre Pettis—of Borough manufacturing-robotMakerBot—actually produced an immediately useable tool on a tabletop of a moving Amtrak dining car.

The Times article started thus:

“It would be very cool, Bre Pettis decided, to take his desktop manufacturing robot, his MakerBot, out of its big black case and plug it in right there in the Amtrak dining car. It would be, like, ’bots on a train.” 

Whereupon, Pettis & Chums rapidly desktop-manufactured—from digits and their 3-D printer—an ABS-plastic bottle opener. With which the assembled trio of witness/techno-mechanics cracked three beers. Presumably toasting their triumph of ‘bots on a train.

Rapid prototyping—or even final production like this—used to be a VERY expensive proposition…only for the Big Guys. Now, Bre Pettis will sell you his MakerBot as a kit starting at $750. The Big Guys are in big trouble.

This prime-mover/innovator is right here…in NeoBrooklyn! Exemplifying the brilliance cum bonkers culture that the Borough now fosters. (And, as so many have proven, our homegrown culture is O-so-creative.)

Now, if you’re a product-centric entrepreneur at your Borough kitchen table, you enjoy low-cost options with which to actually create and prototype your inventive—and NOW commercializable—brainstorms. Next, if you want full production runs, you can turn to China’s Alibaba (first forgetting the incongruous mashup of cultural confusions).

(Yes, I know: exporting manufacturing again! AND, to China!! But, so far, America has NOT managed to coalesce a similar community of flexible, low-cost production companies accessed via a digital-gateway “impresario” firm…yet another opportunity for NeoBrooklyn!)

Alibaba—based on a democratization of the Benetton flexible outsourcing model—is now a major, major player. The third largest firm on China’s national stock exchange. In the Manufacturing Middle Kingdom, Alibaba has identified, aggregated and trained Chinese factories to respond to short-run needs of American innovators. And, everything is communicated via auto-translating Instant Messaging—“Open, Sesame!” Talk about transposing banal tech usage into sublime business…

Here’s another model we need for the manufacturing inventor/innovators of Nanofacturing NeoBrooklyn: TechShop. TechShop is a nascent chain of high-tech/high-end tools, fixtures and systems in a high-support/high interaction workspace. Think the DIY picture-framing shop idea co-opted by digital hackers and numerical-controller geeks who like to mill, lathe and laser high-tech materials to realize high-tech concepts. Making things in a digital shop of this kind is another form of start-up prep.

Further, the “maker movement”—see “Make” magazine: “technology on your time”—is likely to spawn entrepreneurs who’ve cut their teeth in hobbyist mode and want to sink their commercial fangs into the meat of tech-based business creation.

Dear Readers, NeoBrooklyn CAN become a center of Nanofacturing! We have the creativity, the technology, the geekster mentality and the sheer affrontery to pull it off. AND, think of the jobs that homegrown high-growth start-ups can create! So fecund of NeoBrooklyn betterment…

 

C’mon Back!
LAND

[Written and posted 8 April 2010 on his GrowthRoots.com blog.]

 

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“Printing Up Jobs In Your Nabes”: Examining The New 3DP Drivers Of Local Economic Development

3DP Media’s “NY3DP Summits” Roundtable on Neighborhood-Level Digital Re-Industrialization Examines How Community Economic Development Organizations Can Employ 3D Printing To Drive Hyperlocal Wealth Generation.

We kicked-off our week of NY3DP Summits with our “Printing Up Jobs in Your Nabes” Roundtable at the DUMBO Startup Lab, DUMBO, Brooklyn on the evening of Monday, 23 September 2013.

At 3DP Media, one of our primary goals is helping New York City and New York State to foster grassroots, bottom-up, DIY “DigiCottage Industry.”

We’re fervent in our belief that 3D Printing—and the wider arsenal of Digital Fabrication technology—can help foster new  workforce development and middle-class employment in the Nabes. That’s kitchen table by walk-up by storefront—to build and retain neighborhood wealth for the betterment of our commercial and common-good success.

3DP Media gathered eight diverse experts, thought leaders and topic authorities at our Summits first Roundtable to investigate the questions (and more) posed in our title and subtitle. With the distributed power of disruptive (and opportunity-presenting!) 3DP, the hyperlocal is where the action is.

Can we employ 3DP to empower the local Economic Development Organization (EDO: think BID or Merchant Block or Civic Association or Chamber of Commerce) to help “soft re-industrialize” the neighborhood via the DigiFab enabling of their already-aggregated constituencies? Should we target existing businesses and ramp-ups? Or, should the focus shift to startups and entrepreneurs? Can we build 3DP Knowledge Platforms to help various communities create local—yet integrated—”mini-districts” of Digital Fabrication solutions, jobs, synergy and business success across New York City?

So, we enjoyed two hours of Econ Dev/3DP give-&-take, reached some important conclusions and found new connections to future mutual interests. 3DP Media video’d and mind-mapped the entire session. Here is our “Printing Up Jobs in Your Nabes” video in three parts: link to PART #1, PART #2 and PART #3.

Then, return here for more follow-up and additional knowledge built on this innovative Roundtable’s findings. On The Kitchen Table, In The Walk-Up Nano-Factory, In The Storefront Cottage Industry…

C’mon Back!

LAND

 

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