Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication by Neil Gershenfeld

Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication by Neil Gershenfeld

Author:Neil Gershenfeld
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780786722044
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2008-07-30T14:00:00+00:00


Amy

Amy Sun was a prized defense engineer, doing critical work for key government programs on earth and in space. Outside of her day job she had a consuming interest in engaging kids in science and technology, ranging from helping with school outreach programs to building battling robots. I met her in 2002 when she joined my colleagues Professor Ike Chuang, CBA’s program manager Sherry Lassiter, and MIT undergrad Caroline McEnnis, in setting up our first field fab lab, in India at Kalbag’s Vigyan Ashram (a rural science school described in “Making Sense”).

Before going to India, Amy stopped by MIT to help get everything ready, and in the best tradition of incoming MIT students, she promptly took over the lab. She quickly mastered the larger on-campus versions of the tabletop rapid-prototyping tools going into the field, using them to make parts needed for the trip, and much more. Her decision after the trip to become a grad student at MIT followed more as a statement than as a question; she (correctly) assumed that MIT’s application formalities were just a detail, given the obvious match with her abilities and interests.

After a delay while she handed off her projects, she interrupted her previously scheduled life to come to MIT as a student. Along with her research on campus, which entailed shrinking LEGO bricks down to a millionth of a meter in order to assemble microscopic three-dimensional structures, Amy was soon back in the field helping start fab labs in inner-city Boston in 2003 at Mel King’s South End Technology Center, and in 2004 in Ghana at the Takoradi Technical Institute.

She created quite a stir when she arrived in Africa; a typical comment that came back while she was there was, “The lady is amazing she got every stuff in her!” Even better, she was such a strong role model as an engineer that boys using the fab lab asked her questions that had perhaps never been asked before: “Is MIT a girls’ school? Will they let boys in?”

Amy started off fab lab users in Africa by having them use the laser cutter to make puzzles that they had to assemble into geometrical shapes. This was intended to be a warm-up lesson for the students, but it turned into an even greater lesson for the teachers: The street kids coming into the lab were able to solve the puzzles much more quickly than the older students or adults there.

Ironically, while this was going on one of the older teachers in the school asked why the high-tech tools in the fab lab were being wasted on young children. It was an eye-opening moment for him when he saw what those kids could do. Not too long afterwards, a local reverend admonished the community to go home and start fasting and praying because “the Bible tells us that we should be telling the children to come unto and instead we have been pushing our children away.” He was struck by finding that a resource as valuable as the fab lab could be shared with kids rather than protected from them.



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