The words shop class conjure up a messy place where sawdust and metal shavings pile up on the floor as awkward birdhouses are built up on the tables. Computer lab, on the other hand, brings up images of white floors and walls, whirring fans, and overly-good air conditioning. It is also the last place on earth that you would want sawdust and metal shavings. School districts have been closing out their shop classes, because of perceived lack of student interest or liability concerns, as computer labs become ubiquitous.

However, a new hybrid of machine/wood shop, computer lab, and electronics bench is emerging. These are variously called hackerspaces, makerspaces, fab labs, or perhaps robotics labs. They might be spaces open to the public as a place for learning skills or using tools, or focused on some specific activity like building robots or creating fantastical costumes. They may have equipment that runs the gamut from glue guns and fabric to 3D printers, hand tools, laser cutters, and computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) machine tools. For the most part, we will use makerspace as the general term for this type of space, since it seems to be the commonest term in school, library, and museum settings.

When a makerspace is set up in a school, will it become the site for 21st century shop class? What will students learn there? Who can run one of these shops? If you are a teacher, how can you get past the intimidating complexity so that you can learn to use the equipment and get your students using it, too? If you are a parent, what will a home version of these spaces look like?

This chapter talks about the resurging interest in making things, enabled by the combination of low-cost 3D printing and (relatively) easy-to-program electronic components. It introduces the technologies that we talk about extensively in later chapters and what you can do with them. Finally, we introduce ourselves—a traditional engineer/educator and a hacker—and start the conversation we want to have with you throughout this book about how to reconcile these different approaches to learning and how to become conversant with what these technologies make possible.

What Is “Making?”

Being a maker is more of a state of mind than a well-defined activity. In the next section, we lay out our (different) perspectives on what being a maker should be and how someone should become one. For the moment, though, we will define maker as someone who makes something because they want to, even if they could buy what they are making. A maker also typically wants to learn how something works and learns this best by making it.

There are various levels of difficulty of making, and some are closer to fine art or crafting. In this book, we focus on the technology-oriented side of making, while recognizing that often a love of design may come from woodworking or sewing initially and then cross over into electronics, or the other way around. (Figure 1-1, for example, shows an electronic maker’s foray into holiday tree design.)

Even narrowing down making to the technological options leaves an overwhelming number of different possibilities. You may have had the experience of searching online for “Arduino,” for example, and getting dozens of example of things to do with an Arduino board but no explanation of what one actually is. (For the record, it is a microprocessor that can control physical things, which we will meet in depth in Chapter 2.)

This book is intended to be a field guide for you to see where good entry points are for a beginner, and how to move from beginner to more advanced if you do not have a handy community around you already. In the last chapters, we talk about how making can be a good route into learning science, technology engineering, and math (STEM) subjects.

Who Is a 21st Century Shop Teacher ?

One of the challenges of starting up a makerspace is finding people to run it. It requires a mix of skills that are rarely found in one person—a combination of comfort with traditional shop class methods plus electronics plus competence in computer programming. If a school’s IT department is asked to set up a makerspace, they may not have any experience with the issues that arise with making physical things. On the other hand, the shop class or art teacher may not have a lot of experience with the computing aspects of these new hybrid skills.

The authors (Joan and Rich), shown in Figure 1-2 at New York Makerfaire, came into this space on very different trajectories. We worked together for a time at a small 3D printer manufacturer. Now we collaborate on figuring out how to teach just about any subject through hands-on creation of physical objects.

Joan is a traditionally educated baby-boomer aeronautical engineer with a strong computing background. She came into the maker world in early 2013 with almost no hands-on electronics or shop experience. Rich, on the other hand, is a millennial, self-taught electronics hacker and 3D printer guru who has been involved in open source 3D printing since its earliest days (around 2008). This makes him the old-timer of the two of us. In this book, we will give you both sets of insights about how these two communities can best work together. The next section gives you our two first-person views about this community, and how we each think about traditional education and hands-on making. We want you to feel like this book is a conversation with the two of us that will help you figure out how to navigate this new world.

Joan: An Engineer and Educator Meets Making

I learned engineering from university classes at MIT and UCLA, culminating in a Master’s degree in engineering from UCLA. For 16 years I was an engineer at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes spacecraft that go to other planets. In those environments, the critical skill is being able to learn things quickly. I am used to learning things top-down. Usually a first introduction would be from a book or manual, with a lot of equations. In a professional engineering research environment, particularly in aerospace, people become very specialized. I am primarily a software person, and it would have been unthinkable for me to plop down in a spacecraft electronics assembly area and touch anything. In the course of 16 years, I was probably in the same room with actual flight hardware two or three times, if you do not count looking down on it from a glassed-in viewing gallery.

Like most people at JPL, I always had a special relationship with the robot spacecraft I worked with. They almost felt like children, or coworkers. I worked on software that told the Magellan spacecraft what to do. Magellan was the first spacecraft to create radar images of the surface of the planet Venus, which is covered with dense clouds. The software absolutely, positively could not have bugs.

We had to be very creative and deal with situations that no one had ever really thought about before. After all, how many people think about what happens in Venus orbit every day at work? Despite that, excruciatingly careful planning and fanatical attention to detail was also necessary, and JPL in the 1980s and 1990s was probably the last place in the solar system one would exercise a “let’s see what happens” maker mentality. I left JPL in 2000 and consulted in the entrepreneurial aerospace world for a decade. Then I started to spend more and more of my time as an adjunct faculty member at several institutions.

I came into the maker community early in 2013 when I was looking for material for online undergraduate interdisciplinary studies classes. By this time, I was an adjunct faculty member teaching students who were training to be elementary schoolteachers. I wanted them to see science and engineering as a process of discovery, rather than as an exercise in vocabulary worksheets. As it turned out, we decided that the learning curve was too steep at the time to fit it into that particular program, although we piloted one of the first online teacher professional development classes in 3D printing.

By then, I could see the power of 3D printing and other maker technologies and joined a small 3D-printer company. It horrified my new colleagues that I was a rocket scientist who had worked on several interplanetary spacecraft (Galileo to Jupiter and Cassini to Saturn, in addition to Magellan, and some studies of things that never flew), but had not really built anything with my hands since my undergraduate lab days. I felt uneasy touching electronics, even though intellectually I knew it was all hobbyist stuff and if I messed up it would not result in the failure of billions of dollars worth of spacecraft.

Most of my new peers could design and build a consumer 3D printer from nothing but what was in their heads. Some of them (Rich excepted, of course!) did not see the point of all my formal education if I could not sit down and just build something. Specialization seemed some sort of abdication of responsibility to them, given how alien it was to think that you would focus on just one piece of a much bigger project and rely on hundreds of colleagues to know the rest. Makers prided themselves on building something all themselves and on knowing everything about it. Having been part of a team that flew a spacecraft to map Venus seemed inconsistent with the fact that I could not wire a terminal block competently. (Note to anyone over 40 taking up making: go up a half diopter on your reading glasses—some of this stuff is tiny.)

Learning by Doing—Are There Limits?

When it became clear to me that using these 3D printers was pretty complicated (even by recovering rocket scientist standards), I started to develop training materials to make things easier for our customers. When I tried to teach myself how to use open source 3D printers, I found a lot of detailed information scattered online. But there was almost nothing that stepped back and walked through the overall process of creating a 3D print or that defined terms and general concepts for a new user. There were user forums, but they were organized somewhat randomly around whatever order people had asked questions. They were searchable, but you needed to know what questions to ask and what terminology to use. Often that terminology was different than conventional engineering terminology.

When I asked about this, the reaction often was that the detail was there, so what was the problem? Or, secondly, that learning on my own was sort of a rite of passage—that unless I figured everything out myself, I probably was not ready to use the technology anyway. After an extensive period of pestering experienced users (particularly Rich!) and trial and error, I slowly became competent and moved on from there. However, the way I did it was very inefficient at the community level. I saw person after person spend days dragging together the same information from scattered and inconsistent sources.

I had started my career working with early supercomputers at JPL (which had about the same computer power as the $25 processors we will talk about in Chapter 2, but that’s a different story). There are some similarities between 3D printing today and the early days of computing, but even then specialization in hardware or software was pretty common, and there was less of the maker expectation to be good at all aspects.

There is an old joke that says that the difference between scientists and engineers is that scientists like to be surprised but engineers hate it. This implies that engineering is the process of working largely to apply existing knowledge. However, the maker process seems to assume that makers need to discover everything for themselves and thus be engineers who like to surprise themselves.

If you ask a maker about this, they will insist that people learn better by learning everything by doing. To me, though, it seems like this philosophy limits most people to learning only what they can invent themselves and makes it unlikely they will create new knowledge. It is all about how things work, but not about general theory and bigger picture behind it. I call this type of learning icicles—very deep knowledge in some areas, but with gaps in between.

In the end, I wound up writing a book (Mastering 3D Printing, published in 2014 by Apress) with Rich in a technical reviewer role. Writing the book and structuring material for it the way I would like to have learned it brought me up to a level where I felt competent—unless something involves one of those miniscule terminal block connectors (Chapter 2).

Global, Virtual Apprenticeship

If you are traditionally educated in a technical field, you are likely nodding your head now about how “these makers” are reinventing the wheel and avoiding doing the hard work of learning math and science the usual way. You may have been resisting having a makerspace in a school because it is “just playing.” But, notwithstanding everything I have just said, it’s not that simple.

I know that I am a very structured, top-down learner. Given that I am a female engineer who went to school when female engineers were a single-digit percentage of most fields, I am a bit bemused by being the “traditional engineer” in this book. However, I will accept that I have been taught traditionally. Almost all technical fields are taught in a way that favors visual learners and top-down learners.

But if someone learns bottom-up, will they be better off deriving the top-level knowledge themselves? Makers learn things by working in a makerspace and hanging around others, or by doing the same thing virtually by hanging out on forums and discussion boards. But most of all, they learn by trying things and seeing what happens. Is becoming a maker a new way of having a global, virtual apprenticeship if only learning from books is not for you? Or are they a new type of artist? Or are they creating a new discipline altogether? We will try to address these questions as we explore the examples in later chapters of this book.

Not long ago, what you could learn about electronics by cut-and-try experimentation was fairly limited because of cost of the hardware, its complexity, and access to information. The critical piece that is new is the availability of sophisticated but easy-to-use electronics and tools like 3D printers, plus nearly infinite (overly infinite?) web-based information. As we will see in later chapters, these new electronics were designed with either students or hobbyists in mind. Some of the most powerful uses of these new, accessible electronics are in combination with 3D printing. Both students and professionals who need to prototype or make one-of-a-kind things quickly (like product designers, or scientists, or artists) can very quickly and relatively inexpensively turn out a pretty sophisticated first version of an electronic device or a scientific instrument or a piece of kinetic art.

Many students learn best if they can immediately apply what they have learned to something concrete in front of them. Some of these students are ones who might have excelled in shop class when that was an option for them. (As mentioned, most shop classes in the United States are being shut down, for perceived lack of interest or liability reasons.) Others are fascinated by the virtual world and come into making from the programming side—also an area that is not supported well in all school districts. What does maker learning look like?

I will now hand this over to Rich to describe his path into making, and the hacker-versus-maker approach. There he is in his typical work environment in Figure 1-3.

Rich: The Hacker Path

I learned engineering from the single greatest repository of knowledge humanity has ever produced: the Internet. Like many hackers, I am an autodidact. In school, I excelled at tests but still only passed some of my classes by the skin of my teeth. I couldn’t stand to waste time on assignments intended to teach concepts through mindless repetition when they were clear to me when they were first introduced. Instead, I liked to spend my time learning C and similar programming languages to develop various software projects.

I’ve always found that the best way to learn anything is to first have some project that the knowledge is required to accomplish. Of course, unfettered access to information is crucial, but the Internet makes that easier than it’s ever been. With the exception of one basic electronics class and the standard set of math and science classes where the students complained about needing to learn things they’d never use, I haven’t gone to school for any of the knowledge I use on a daily basis. I developed one of the first low-cost 3D printers (Chapter 3) and became vice president of research and development at a small 3D-printer company on the strength of what I have been able to teach myself.

My basic electronics class taught me Ohm’s and Watt’s laws (Chapter 2) and other concepts over the course of a semester, but I learned far more during the first week that I sat down with an Arduino and something to accomplish (Chapter 2 talks about Arduinos). I started designing circuits and fabricating circuit boards, at first using things like perf board and conductive ink, then using free computer-aided design (CAD) software and mail-order prototyping services.

I began building robots with Arduinos as controllers, and when I needed more complex and precise mechanical parts than I could produce with hand tools, I decided to use one of these Arduinos to build a CNC mill to cut the shapes I needed automatically from CAD drawings. When looking for software to use with such a machine, what I found was the software for controlling open source 3D printers. A 3D printer, as you will learn in Chapter 3, is a robot that can make things, including other machines, and in many cases even copies of its own parts or improvements for itself. This quickly became more interesting than my robots or the CNC mill, and I’ve been working on open source 3D-printer designs ever since.

Hacker vs. Maker

Though the situation has been improving in recent years, the term hacker has been much maligned and misunderstood more often than not in the media and in popular understanding. Hacking does not consist of writing computer viruses, defacing websites, and breaking into computers for mischief or personal gain, though hacking is usually a necessary precursor to these activities.

One of the several definitions (and my personal favorite) for hacker is in the Jargon File (www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html), probably the oldest and most complete reference for the terminology used by hackers. It says: “One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.” Hacking uses and develops a person’s creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving, the three most universally important skills one can have.

Some people do not like to use the word hacker to describe the types of activity in this book, because they think of the word in the sense of a black hat (as opposed to a white hat) computer security hacker. A stereotypical black hat hacker overcomes or circumvents obstacles imposed by computer security systems because they want to damage or steal something, whereas a white hat does so to find security holes so that they can be fixed. However, a true hacker’s motivation for overcoming these obstacles is simply for the challenge (and possibly the bragging rights) of doing so. Whatever shenanigans they may get up to after the barriers are broken do not define what it means to be a hacker.

Only a small but sensationalized minority of the larger hacker community is involved with breaking computer security systems. The inherently constructive types of hacking we describe in this book have nothing to do with this type of hacking. The limitations we try to overcome are often simply the limits of what anyone has ever figured out how to do, or even thought possible. In this sense, almost everyone who ever invented some new technology was a hacker of some sort.

The maker movement grew out of this hacker culture as well as the do-it-yourself (DIY)/hobbyist and avant-garde art/sculpture scenes. Type kinetic sculpture into your search engine of choice to see some particularly impressive examples of what makers do. Although hacking is occasionally used for destructive ends, making is a constructive pursuit by definition. Though both terms are equally applicable to most of the things that people like me do and what goes on in a hackerspace (I prefer that classic term into over makerspace), maker is often seen in language that has been sanitized for those who may still misunderstand what hacking is all about. There is a subtle distinction that hacking is motivated primarily by the enjoyment of creative problem solving, whereas making is directed more toward the end product. In this sense I am a hacker first, and a maker second.

Learning by Doing: Overcoming the Limits

There is age-old knowledge that will always be useful, but in a field as fast-moving as 3D printing, the most important thing to learn is whatever was discovered yesterday. Traditional education can teach the old stuff, but when it comes to keeping up with new developments, you’re on your own. The open source communities make this information available to find, but learning to learn is an essential skill. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, knowing how to recognize and fill the gaps in your knowledge when you need to is worth more than a billion memorized facts and formulae.

There is one kind of knowledge that is more valuable than what was discovered yesterday, and that’s what will be discovered tomorrow. Learning how to find information is critical, but you’ll never contribute any new knowledge if you can’t figure things out for yourself. Classically educated engineers tend to look down on what self-taught hackers like me do as “just playing” and think it’s foolish to discover things for ourselves that are already known and could just be taught to us. However, by reproducing past inventions and discoveries for yourself without the prior knowledge, you are also learning how to invent and discover new things.

People don’t become great musicians by listening to a lot of music, but by practicing simple pieces of music before they can perform difficult ones, and although watching a lot of baseball on TV might make someone more likely to get a seat at the World Series, the players on the field started in Little League. Things that are easy to discover have already been discovered, and things that are easy to invent have already been invented, but to discover or invent more difficult things that are new to the world, you need practice discovering and inventing simpler things that are new to you. If a man learns how to make a wheel, he’ll be able to get to the next town. If he learns how to invent the wheel, he might make it to the moon.

Joan likes to talk about top-down vs. bottom-up learning, but I think of my method as more of a middle-out strategy, more like ice crystals spreading out in a supercooled liquid (search for videos of that online if you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty impressive) from various nucleation points rather than the icicles that Joan envisions. I learn best by gathering disparate, seemingly random bits of information when I need them and then get the deepest understanding by integrating and filling in the gaps between them on my own. New bits that are close enough to something I already understand just make sense and are easy to absorb, and if a gap is too large, a quick Internet search allows me to find the bit of information in the middle until all the gaps are small enough to bridge easily.

At the same time, I like to ponder the edges of my understanding and figure out related things, practicing expanding my knowledge. Unlike the way the same subjects might be taught in a school, these new areas of thought may cross into a different subjects and back, and some of the most interesting and unique topics are ones that fall between typical class subjects, and may even be things that a traditional education would fail to cover. I sometimes spend hours at a time pondering things that nobody really understands, like the connection between quantum physics and general relativity.

Physical Software

I was always more of a software hacker and never had much interest in taking a shop class when I was in school. It may seem odd then that my most well-known contributions to the open source 3D-printing community are hardware projects: 3D-printer and component designs, and other printable objects. The fact is, the tools of digital fabrication turn hardware and mechanical designs into a software problem. CAD software allows circuits, components, or entire machines to be designed and sometimes even simulated in software before any of the physical parts are made. Then the computer-controlled machines can turn those designs into physical products with minimal human interaction.

These 21st-century shop tools aren’t yet the simple IT devices that 2D paper printers are (though some less honest 3D-printer manufacturers make them out to be), but they’re a lot closer to it than the human-operated machine tools that they replace, and they’re getting closer. This fact made it possible for me to do hardware design and fabrication within the software realm that I was comfortable in, allowing me to think of hardware design as a physical extension of software hacking.

The first CAD program I learned to use was CadSoft EAGLE, a program popular in the Arduino community for designing circuit boards. I taught myself how to use it to design my own Arduino-compatible development boards and robot controllers. Then I uploaded my designs to online PCB prototyping services so that I could order my custom boards and receive them in the mail. Once they arrived, I would solder in the components, try the circuit, and (if necessary) modify the design and re-order.

The tool that enabled me to use software to create real things the most was OpenSCAD. OpenSCAD is the quintessential “physical software” tool, billing itself as “the programmer’s solid 3D CAD modeler.” In OpenSCAD, you build up complex 2D and 3D objects from simple primitives in a process called constructive solid geometry. To do this, you write code in a language with a C-like syntax (which my prior programming experience allowed me to pick up in a matter of hours). This approach to design isn’t for everyone, and there are many more mouse-oriented CAD options, but for someone with a software hacking background like mine, it’s ideal. I can quite literally code physical objects the same way I would code a computer program.

How the Paths Merge

So who will be a 21st century shop teacher? Our answer is that it will take people like the two of us coming together to create bridges between the traditional education and the maker communities. Those of us who know book-learning science will continue to pass it on. But for relevance and application, 21st-century shop will need a big dose of actual making things. As Rich says, much of what we know now did not exist a few years ago, and learning to learn will be the high-value skill as many barriers to prototyping and manufacturing fall.

However, it is also necessary to learn accurate material. Currently the maker community manages this by being small and an everyone-knows-everyone type of group, but of necessity this is changing. Not everyone has the ability to recapitulate Isaac Newton and other greats to reinvent everything as they go, either.

Given that, how will people learn five or ten or twenty years from now? As Joan found when she tried to learn 3D printing from unstructured materials, even a very good technical education does not necessarily make it easy to learn a whole new field from scratch. However, it did help her organize what was known to make it easier for everyone who comes after.

To take that to the next level, a much closer collaboration between educator and hacker is required, and the result is this book. We argue a lot and do not see entirely eye-to-eye on the best path for education. However, we have mutual respect and can see we each learned best in our own ways. We also have a shared love for plain cheese pizza, which helped create common ground in the beginning and now is just a plus.

Defining Your Problem

Many who are reading this book likely are parents or traditional educators. This book is designed to help with situations like the following:

• Your child has asked for an Arduino starter kit for her birthday, and you were embarrassed to discover that it was not a dog breed, as you originally assumed.
• Your principal has announced a maker initiative for your school and asked you to coordinate it and produce a budget. You have little or no idea how to proceed.
• You are a school administrator, and parents are asking what practical skills their children are learning. Or perhaps parents are asking about when you will include 3D printing and maker technologies in the classroom.
• You bought a 3D printer to teach math and science either at home or in a classroom, unboxed it, printed a Star Wars figurine, and wondered, “Now what?”
• 25 Arduino starter kits have just been delivered to your school courtesy of a donor, and you had no idea so much wire and so many fragile small parts would be involved. And no one has the least clue what to do with them or how to teach with them.
• You already are into this type of learning but need some evidence to convince dubious colleagues to introduce maker activities into your curriculum.

To address situations like these and more, we have structured the book into a chapter for each of the major types of maker technologies. Table 1-1 is a survey of what we address in this book. We also list the basic skill sets that you will need to learn concurrently if you are going to use these technologies and the chapter that goes into each area in more depth. In each chapter, we give a rough indication of how much it costs to get a “starter set” and get going with it. These skill set and costs summaries appear at the end of Chapters 2 through 8.

Part of the point of playing with these different technologies is to learn the skills listed here (versus thinking that you would need to learn programming or soldering first, for example). The learning curve can be pretty steep, as we will see when we go into Arduinos and 3D printing in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively, and it is hard to learn these skills in isolation without a project to help you focus on what to learn first, as Rich noted in his backstory earlier in this chapter. For that reason, these skills are often taught in project-based ways that teach a little bit of each of the skills needed (say, programming and wiring just a few components, in the case of the electronics-oriented spheres). You can do progressively harder projects as you build the many skills needed to get started.

Making a Scientist

Let’s take a step back now and ask: why are we rushing around trying to figure out how to use these maker technologies in education? Making is good training to be a scientist. If you just absorb preexisting knowledge without some discovering of it yourself, you will not appreciate or be able to see it as a process. All too often, Joan encounters someone who thinks science is too hard for the average person to understand, or who thinks that the best way to teach science is as a vocabulary lesson, with worksheets that match a concept and word. This kills the idea of science as exploration and inquiry, which is what makes it fun (and hard).

Scientists, though, are usually makers. Anyone doing laboratory work might need to make or modify equipment. By the nature of their work, typically scientists are doing something for the first time. For the most part, they need to design experiments that can be done by existing equipment. More and more, though, these same low-cost electronics that allow you to learn in the first place can be used to create simple equipment capable enough to do a new type of experiment, or to collect vastly more data than was possible before. We talk about this aspect in Chapter 6, when we discuss citizen science and open source labs.

More fundamentally, though, the maker (or hacker) mindset—the let’s see what happens attitude—is a crucial part of being a scientist. To prove that, in Chapters 12–14 we have collected a lot of short vignettes about working scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, with some explanations of their thought processes. Some stories are about the professionals as children, getting in trouble by blowing something up (or in one case putting a fork in an outlet). Others talk about the practicalities of what they do all day. All of them, though, will give you some idea of why it is a good idea to use some precious formal education classroom time to actually make things.

The final chapters of this book tie together the maker concepts in Chapters 2–11 and the stories of technologists in Chapters 12–14 to make some recommendations about how to teach by making with a combination of 3D printing, maker electronics, and some old-fashioned tools, too. We also talk about how important it is to try things and fail. If you have to succeed all the time (as Joan saw at JPL), it limits the pace of learning. Low-cost making means you can have low-stakes failed projects, which is critical for learning engineering and science.

Making and the Common Core

If you are involved in education in the United States, you are probably very aware of the Common Core Initiative (www.corestandards.org). These new standards incorporate problem-solving and critical-thinking skills as central requirements for how students learn. We do not explore those links explicitly in this book, but note them here as something to explore further in the many resources available to teachers about the Common Core. If you search on the name of a technology and “Common Core,” you will find a lot of aligned materials.

Educational Implications

Over the last several decades, manufacturing in the United States has gradually declined (although there is a lot of recent effort to change that). Because this means there are fewer jobs in manufacturing, traditional shop class has been languishing at many schools. If you couple declining interest with the liability issues of machine tools, you can see why schools with budget problems have been shuttering their shop classes. See, for instance, this article in Forbes by Tara Tiger Brown (www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2012/05/30/the-death-of-shop-class-and-americas-high-skilled-workforce).

Creating a makerspace is a way to walk back into offering some sort of hands-on class, even if it is not a full-on shop class. The very things that make it hard to get started—that you do need to learn about the physical world—mean that students who have learned this way have a leg up over those who have never actually put anything together.

Broader Social Implications

The other impact of maker technologies (particularly 3D printing) has been to vastly lower the cost of making a prototype. Reducing the cost and raising the accessibility of a technology essentially democratizes it. This means that it is now possible for a seventh grader to create a prototype of a physical object that a few years ago would have required a professional modelmaker. 3D printing is the physical equivalent of low-cost computer graphic tools. This is nice for the seventh grader and may get her an A, but it is transformative for many professions, like product design. It also changes how those professionals work. If you are in the business of training people to be product designers, or engineers, or entrepreneurs for that matter, it is important that students learn how they will later work.

Making Prototyping Cheaper

If prototypes are cheaper and faster to make, the design process itself also becomes more iterative and more tolerant of failure along the way. Manufacturing may experience a broader sea change soon. A piece in Harvard Business Review’s blog by Peter Acton speculated that the ability to manufacture in small lots at home could create sweeping social change, as mass manufacturing starts to lose both its appeal and its price edge. (https://hbr.org/2014/12/is-the-era-of-mass-manufacturing-coming-to-an-end). These shifts imply that jobs will be shifting too—which means students need to be prepared differently for this emerging economic model.

Intellectual Property Issues

One of the biggest issues for these technologies is that making copies of physical objects becomes very easy. Intellectual property law will take a while to catch up with 3D printing in particular. How do we think about sharing (or selling) files that are then used to print physical things? When scanning technology gets more readily available, what will the rules be for copying something for your own use, or to sell it, particularly if you then build on the design and change it a lot? If you search on “intellectual property 3D printing,” you can see the various discussions out there on these topics.

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the concept of a maker and told you how the two authors came to be writing this book from their respective points of view (educator/engineer and hacker). We introduced the different technologies that are explained in depth in later chapters and pointed out that each chapter talks about the technology as well as summarizes what it can be used for, what you need to learn to use it, and how much it costs to get started. We also introduced the educational and broader social implications of these technologies.