Priming your kid to take advantage of the surging demand for engineers by slamming a STEM education down their backpack? You might want to relocate to Jackson. Jackson Hole High School will be opening the first "Fab Lab" in the state of Wyoming and one of only 37 nationwide, where students can use a variety of digital tools, computer programs, and a variety of machines including a 3D printer to train the kind of unencumbered free thinking, particularly of the engineering kind, that educators believe the US really needs in the globalized 21st century. The "maker movement" that started in Germany in the 1990s has grown, especially since the evolution of the 3D printer has allowed amateurs as well as professionals to make scale models of buildings, figurines, even working firearms out of plastics or metal, and its entrance into the classroom has more or less the computerized the old-fashioned shop class, with students also using later cutters and milling machines to bring imaginings from their math and science classes to life. Planet Jackson Hole described the classes in the Fab Lab, which start with an Art and Science of Making class this fall, as "part machine shop, part art studio and part brainstorming sessions."
· FAB(ulous) LAB: Public school gets pimped out! [Planet Jackson Hole]
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