Just down the hall from Paulo Blikstein’s office at Stanford University is a student laboratory of the future. It has spring green-and-yellow tiled floors, matching walls and is stocked with every type of digital fabrication tool one can imagine: laser cutters, 3D printers, 3D scanners, 3D milling machines, robotics, and programming tools. “In short, we have machines that can shape objects and electronics to make those objects behave,” says Blikstein, director of the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University.
MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld originally envisioned Fab Labs as small-scale digital workshops accessible to all. Blikstein adapted the concept specifically for junior high and high schools. His FabLabs@School are spaces where students work on long-term, creative projects, using their imaginations to bridge the gap between their ideas and the tools and training necessary to bring them to fruition. Since 2009, Blikstein and his colleagues have opened five experimental FabLabs@School: one in Bangkok, Thailand; one in Moscow, Russia; and three in Palo Alto. A sixth is opening soon in Melbourne, Australia, a seventh in Mexico City. As they roll out the labs, they conduct careful research on how best to deploy and make use of them in an educational setting.
I visited Blikstein on a recent trip to Palo Alto to hear more about his work.
Why is it important for middle and high-school students to have access to digital workshops like the FabLabs@School?
I think one of the things about Fab Labs and maker spaces, especially for children, is that children have very interesting, creative ideas, but the distance between the ideas and their realization is very large. What Fab Labs and maker spaces do is to put the idea and its realization closer together—they make it easier and faster. These are the hammers and saws and scissors of the 21st century.
Would these replace old-school labs with beakers and Bunsen burners?
The labs that we create and design can also be used for chemistry and biology, because we want the science teacher to use the lab to do projects. These labs can be engineering labs but also chemistry and science labs, and I think the integration is very important to understand: the engineering and science is all connected.
Too often, science labs are what we call “cookbook labs” – they’re too scripted. That removes the excitement and inquiry from science. Students already know the result before they even start the experiment. When you do science in these Fab Lab spaces, you can do it in an inquiry based way.
What do you want students to gain from working in a Fab Lab?
One goal is that we have all these new sets of skills and abilities that we want kids to learn: critical thinking, problem solving, advanced communication skills. We want them to be able to navigate ill-structured problems, and building projects in those labs is a great way to learn those skills.
But it’s also about the relevance of school itself. Fifty years ago, kids could go to school and then play baseball or ride their bikes around the neighborhood. Today there are a billion other things you can do if you’re a child in the 21st century: play video games, travel, be on Facebook, be on your computer, make videos, compose music. The problem is that all of those other thing are very compelling, and they are evolving very rapidly, yet school is still much the same as it was 50 years ago. We need to make school more exciting, more interesting, more attention grabbing. Otherwise, it will become a mandatory but irrelevant part of kids’ lives. Especially for kids from low-income communities, because they don’t have college-educated parents to help them at home. The more we can make school exciting and interesting, the more we are benefitting low-income kids. Because if those kids don’t see anything interesting in school they just drop out. Middle class kids don’t drop out, because their parents will tell them to stay in school.
My theory is, when we make school more exciting, more interesting, we are disproportionately helping people who need it the most.
Read the full story.
Read the Stanford story about the FabLab that Blikstein helped to establish in Thailand.
Read more about Blikstein's Transformative Learning Technologies Lab.
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