Digital fabrication labs in schools

We're reading about digital fabrication from Paulo Blikstein's paper, Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education:The Democratization of Invention.

The paper gives us an overview of how digital fabrication labs came to be, started in the historically based in mechanic shops and DIY perspectives that mashed up into a new way of viewing art and hands on practical skills. Blikstein's gives us questions to think about in regards to what having these new ways of creating, such as laser printers, and what the potential or lack of potential could be. Blikstein gives an example about key chains created by school aged children. They create the key chains and when asked what they could do with the laser printers, they repeated, make more key chains and sell them. I thought this was insightful because what it does is show how A. we can capitalize on making things to sell, B. shows a certain amount of limit in what the kids have been exposed to in terms on creating with a laser printer...in other words, if kids had been shown how to make origami robot templates via a video, would they have tried this out too? Maybe the instruction should not be just key chains (though, admittedly, some kids would just prefer this) but show them they can go beyond the example given to them.

Why Do We Need Digital Fabrication Labs in Schools?

These examples highlight five important design principles which I copy/pasted directly from the paper below:

(a) The “Keychain Syndrome:” since digital fabrication machines might generate aesthetically-pleasing products with little effort, educators should shy away from quick demonstration projects andpush students towards more complex endeavors;

(b) The power of despair and visceral involvement: FabLabs provide an environment forunprecedented visceral design experiences, multiple cycles of design, and new levels for both frustrationand excitement, which students normally do not experience in their normal school experience;

(c) Powerful interdisciplinary projects: the artificial boundaries between disciplines are completely reconfigured in the lab. History and mathematics become closely related, and so do music and robotics,and this richness results in a more diverse and accepting intellectual environment;

(d) Contextualized learning in STEM: students have the opportunity to come across several conceptsin engineering and science in a highly meaningful, engaging, and contextualized fashion. Abstract ideassuch as friction and momentum become meaningful and concrete when they are needed to accomplish atask within a project; math becomes a necessity in a history project.

(e) Intellectualization and re-evaluation of familiar practices, rather than the replacement of existing ones (Blikstein, 2008): Students bring their own familiar practices to the lab (craft,construction, carpentry), and those practices get augmented using socially-valued tools such as computational and mathematics. The malleability of the equipment and the pedagogical space in the lab makes the augmentation and embracement of such practices feasible, generating an environment that values multiple ways of working.

One of the ideas that kept popping into my head is the idea of how we need to be aware that commerce is good to an extent. Ethical questions rose in my mind about whether people would sell their ideas to the highest bidder, would people have no problem making things that could be used for war (like the origami robot...sounds cool but they mention directly this could be used in warfare), and so forth. Being aware that these could be used for nefarious reasons is something we need to mention as teachers as well as human beings.

The biggest strength for digi labs, in my opinion, is that is takes mechnics class and makes it accessible to all kids, regardless of gender/economic status/ideas of life choices (being a doctor, lawyer, artist, etc). There is a huge stereotype that people who can't fit into a chosen profession at age 9, are "doomed" to vocational school. This actually, does, democratize skills that everyone can use.