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FabLab of creativity, maths and technology

August 31, 2015
Education HQ
By 
Sarah Duggan

An all-girls school in Victoria is trailblazing the utilisation of digital fabrication and hands-on learning in the 21st Century.

In the heart of Armadale, a leafy suburb in Melbourne’s south east, a learning revolution is quietly gathering speed.

Today at Lauriston Girls’ School a chirpy group of Year 5 and 6 students are busy creating scores of music in the schools’ own ‘FabLab’ – but there is not an instrument to be seen. Instead, the children eagerly tap away on laptops, programming codes to piece together their digital compositions.

This inspired merging of creativity, maths and technology is just one very small example of the type of cross-curricular learning that the school’s fabrication laboratory is fostering.

And this, according to principal Susan Just, strikes at the heart of what the FabLab@Schools concept is all about.

“We want to have these technologies available to the girls in every subject that they study, so that we can really start to communicate to them that an understanding of maths and science and technology is something that they use all the time and it’s not segmented into specific subject areas,” she tells TechnologyEd.

Although the ‘Fab’ in FabLab technically stands for ‘fabrication’, everything about this tech-infused space is, well, literally fabulous.

“If you’re at a school you expect to have a science laboratory where you can do experiments, you expect to have an arts studio where you can go and work on your art, you expect to have perhaps a media room where you can do visual communication and you can do media studies – the FabLab is another laboratory, but it’s a laboratory in which you can do cross- disciplinary projects,” Just enthuses.

“So with the cross-disciplinary approach, you can be in history [class] and you can go to the FabLab to be working on a project, perhaps in migration, if you’re doing geography you can use the 3D printer to start actually looking at contours.”

Fitted out with two 3D printers, an epilogue helix laser and lino cutter, programming devices, plus a host of more rudimentary hand and soldering tools, the FabLab might be conceived as a kind of workshed-come-techhub, where students of all ages can engage both their hands and their brains to explore the world and their place in it.

“The sorts of equipment that you would find in our FabLab are all of those tools and pieces of equipment for learning, but you are learning in perhaps a more experiential way, in a more hands-on way. 
“You can see in science there is value in experiential learning, but there is that same level of value in doing that type of experiential learning in English, in history and in art,” Just says.

Born as the result of the leader’s grand vision to revolutionise the nature of STEM-based learning at Lauriston, the FabLab is modelled on one established at Stanford University in the US and is the first of its kind in an Australian school.

“When we were looking at how to enhance the technology that we have at our school, I started to give quite a bit of consideration to the work that I had been reading about that has been going on at Stanford University around fabrication and the development of the FabLab@School concept.

“I also then started to look at those schools who have FabLabs and there’s one in the US that’s near Stanford, it’s in Palo Alto, called Castilleja Girls School, very similar to our own school, and I was really interested in the type of cross-disciplinary work that was happening at Castilleja,” Just shares.

Thoroughly intrigued and excited by the concept, the educator travelled to the US to see a FabLab in action for herself.

“I was able to go and visit professor Paulo Blikstein at Stanford, I also visited Castilleja Girls School and came back with the gem of an idea that we could in fact have our own FabLab here at school and that we would make it cross-disciplinary...”

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