The FabLab@School Project: Digital Fabrication for the Other 99%

The FabLab@School project, which started in 2008 at Stanford University, is a new type of digital fabrication lab especially designed for schools and children, stemming from three years of research. This talk will discuss how to successfully take digital fabrication into schools, not just for the self-selected 1% of teenage hardware hackers, but for all students, with deep integration into the school culture and disciplines such as math, science, and art. We will show numerous successful examples of how these fablabs@school are turning into small open-hardware invention powerhouses in Russia, Thailand, and the US.

About Paulo Blikstein
Paulo Blikstein is an assistant professor at Stanford University. He created in 2008 the FabLab@School project, a pioneering program to build digital fabrication labs in K12 schools, now in the US, Russia, Thailand. Blikstein and his colleague Arnan Sipitakiat created the first open hardware educational robotics board at MIT in 2002, the GoGo Board. Blikstein holds a PhD. from Northwestern University and a MSc. from the MIT Media Lab.