Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.16.11 | Whenever the conversation turns to the growing popularity in the last few years of maker culture—and its potential to transform the ways students see technology and education—I always expect someone to mention Orson Scott Card’s classic fantasy series, The Tales of Alvin Maker, as an inspiration. 

Instead of imagining the major opposing forces in the world within the traditional confines of Good vs. Evil or God vs. the Devil, Card sees the world in a constant struggle between the forces of Making and UnMaking. And he centers the series around a child, Alvin, whose remarkable Making abilities are humanity’s last great hope.

What would the Alvins of our work, the Young Makers of today who end up using their hands for at least some stages of a project, do with the MakerBot? It’s the first consumer and school-budget friendly 3-D printer—the ultimate DIY tool that can make a digital creation a physical reality with the press of a button.

We are about to find out. The makers of the MakerBot will have a booth at this weekend’s Maker Faire Bay Area, which, as Sarah noted in the most recent Playback, will feature, as usual, a strong Young Maker component.

MakerBot Industries, which one of the founders describes as “obsessively open-source” and very maker-friendly, encourages users to post the designs they create for the machine on the company blog, Thingiverse, where everyone has access to them. Designs can be improved upon or taken in new directions.

The company is also making a big push to get the MakerBot into the hands of teachers and students. Late last year it sponsored a MakerBot Teacher Giveaway, awarding the printers to 10 teachers around the world. And those teachers are writing about their experiences using the MakerBot in the classroom on the MakerBot Educators Google Group. They also presently sponsoring another giveaway at Instructables, a web-based community that began at MIT Media Lab and allows people to “share what they do and how they do it.”

Finally, MakerBot Industries staff is presently teaching a free course to teens at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Watch them in action below:

To learn more about the MakerBot and the growing community of users, check out Melena Ryzik’s recent article in The New York Times. She visited the inaugural open house at the MakerBot offices in Brooklyn and spoke with the founders and artists-in-residence, who evangelize more about the emerging MakerBot-inspired design community than the product itself.

Co-founder Bre Pettis makes a statement about his business that could very well apply to a re-imagined, digitally literate classroom: “In this age of the Internet, the sharers are the people who will come out ahead — the people who make progress and then share it so that other people can stand on their shoulders.”

Who knows? They just might save the world.