Say hello to our newest operator!

Mommy, are all my future toys in here? They are?! Awesome!

Me & My daughter are very happy that the Makerbot arrived (Sweden)! Promised to print some toys Thanks @Makerbot via.me/-1n5upsq

— Ticko (@Ticko) June 1, 2012

If that doesn’t help you start your day off with a smile… I just don’t know how to help you.

Next Saturday, April 21 — right around the corner! — is ACE Academy’s 3rd Annual ACE Innovation in Austin, TX. The event is an “all ages oriented, public event celebrating Austin’s community of creative entrepreneurs.”

That sounds wonderful, except so far there won’t be a MakerBot there! Anyone in the area with a MakerBot on hand should absolutely spend the day out at the University of Texas campus and share the love with this community. Laurie writes at Nereus Notebook that the event will include,

demonstrations of stop-motion animation, 3D printing, robotics, rocketry and various community programs. Show your support for Austin’s young innovators and our highly-creative entrepreneurial community if you’re in town.

Sounds like a fun afternoon!

In this episode we’ll meet MakerBot operator Steve Conine – known to Thingiverse as sconine. Steve is most famous for designing Thingiverse’s Mechanical Animals, Toy Train Sets, Log Cabins and Starfish. Check out some of the many toys that he has designed and printed with his children and find out why he decided to bring a MakerBot into the family.

Earlier this month, the DIY electronics kit site Adafruit launched a digital version of its “skill badges.” The idea is to create a model of a system for educators and youth leaders to recognize the new generation of Scouts — the Makers!

We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share. Our physical badges and stickers are for use with educators, classrooms, workshops, Maker Faires, TechShops, Hackerspaces,Makerspaces and around the world to reward beginners on their skill building journey! Our digital skill badges are the start of whatLadyada (Limor Fried) and the Adafruit team think might be “Scouts 2.0″.

(Incidentally, the 3D printing site Fabbaloo posted on Friday that they had received a box of the original embroidered badges and gave their public verdict that they are “very attractive.”) But look! It seems that the online badge hasn’t been awardedto anyone yet! To get a feel for how a badge is awarded, the page indicates the following:

This skill badge is awarded for those who have done amazing things with 3D printing. Whether they’ve built a kit, designed a system from scratch, or explored a new method,  they’re bringing the future home!

That said, it seems it’s oriented toward kids, as the Beta program details read,

We hope you enjoy the first round of students and young persons who we’ve awarded badges to. If you know a young person who has done something amazing and shared their projects let us know! To see the “leaderboard” click here!

Do you know of any kids that deserve the 3D Printing badge? Or better yet, are you a teacher who wants to find a way to award this badge or others to your students? Here is one teacher’s example of the requirements he uses for students to earn the badge. And for the kids in the 18-and-older crowd, don’t be deterred from building up your own badge collection! Pete at RasterWeb says it was just time for him to recognize his own accomplishments. Couldn’t agree more!

Sometime last holiday season I passed through Union Square.  There were Christmas trees being bought, sold and sawed and I bent down to pick up a scrap.  Being that I stare at glowing rectangles most hours of the day, I wanted to feel its texture and smell its sap.  It fit nicely in my pocket, too, so I took it along.

As I walked along 10^th Avenue, I reached into my jacket pocket, by now full of dirt and sap, took out the wood and held it to my ear.  “Hello?” I said.  I kept talking into my piece of Christmas tree as passersby shot perplexed stares my way.

I’m Bobby Genalo, a graduate student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. As part of my thesis, MakerBot has given me access to its resources and community for a project called Artphones, a platform for transforming anything into a working cell phone.  The conversation I’m looking to have, however, has less to do with the realities of crafting one’s own phone, and more about something I’ve been calling the malleability of life.

I see life as an impermanent and iterative experience, where each project is birthed from the one before it.  I want to celebrate risk, promote jaywalking instead of using the crosswalk*, and end each conversation with “and then?”  What if a school were to take this approach?  It’s my thinking that we might get students who not only are prepared for the future, but who see their world as a playground of opportunities right now.

Earlier this month, I got the chance to demo this dream with a 3rd grade class at The Packer Collegiate Institute here in Brooklyn.  I had made arrangements with their teacher, Maureen Reilly (who also teaches LEGO Robotics), to discuss the Artphone with her 20 students and begin exploring their ideas for custom walkie-talkies (3rd graders are too young for cell phones).

I introduced the idea with a book that most in attendance were familiar with: “The Giving Tree.”  I explained that I had photographed tree stumps around Brooklyn, the evidence of a large storm that passed through the Northeast last year.  Having recently read the book with my niece, I was inspired to prove that, with a little technical know-how, a stump needn’t be the end of a tree’s life.  I showed how I created a mesh of a stump using 123D Catch, cleaned it up in a 3D modeling program, and printed it out using MakerBot’s Replicator.  Eyes were wide.  The children took quickly to sketching their walkie-talkies and await my return for when they will sculpt their designs with clay (March 26).

Concurrently, I have begun asking certain adults (with existing carrier plans and SIM cards) to explore, tangibly, their ideal mobile phone.  The hardware for these phones, as I’ve told my first users, will be screen-less and internet-less.  It’s my hope that designing a cell phone without the constraint of a bulky screen will, formally, emphasize ergonomic factors, conceptually free them from a reliance on constant information and, mechanically, be far easier for users to dissect.

I’m working on the Artphone in the hopes of inspiring a transference of responsibility from the producer to the consumer.  How can we spark a curiosity about the “hows” and “whys” of our everyday tools that motivates people to create?  Can we shift the dialogue about cell phones so that, at the end of its life, it can be celebrated like a child’s drawing on the fridge or a diploma on the wall?

And then?

More of Bobby’s thoughts and work can be seen at www.genalodesigns.com/blog

*For reasons that aren’t obvious, it’s been demonstrated that jaywalking is in fact safer than crossing legally. Read more in the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt.

Speaking of kids who love MakerBots, here is a delightful blast from the recent past. It’s been 9 months since we posted a video of Schuyler St. Leger, and it is high time for a reminder!

A lot of MakerBot owners out there have kids. After all, the busy parent may understand best how sweet it is to set a print for a screwdriver, rather than making an extra stop at the hardware store after work.

One MakerBot parent out there may have inadvertently created the biggest superfan we’ve seen to date. World, meet Beckham.

Beck’s dad Joe got a Thing-o-Matic in January of this year and spent three weekends with his then 6-year-old son putting it together. Now two months later, Beck, having transitioned from the folly of youth to the practical, industrious, prime-numberness of 7, is “obsessed and that’s all he wants to do. … It’s makerbot 24-7.”

Need proof? Here’s a picture of Beck’s birthday cake, for which his mom iced out a picture of a Thing-o-Matic, complete with bunny print — by request.

So far the father-son duo have mostly explored objects available in Thingiverse, but lately Joe has tried his hand importing designs into Cinema4D. The printing is still supervised by parents, but Beck keeps a watchful eye to make sure everything is on track.

As it’s our great interest that MakerBot’s be used in educational settings, I couldn’t resist asking what Beck’s classmates think of the machine.

…it’s the first thing that he shows his friends, then he shows his collection of prints that he keeps in a special box. We haven’t brought the bot to school just yet, but he has brought pictures of the replicator as well as some prints to show and tell.

So Beck’s a big fan of the MakerBot. What kid wouldn’t be, right? Yes; but have you ever seen a 7-year-old react like this to a spool of plastic?

That type of enthusiasm is contagious, and exactly the reason why more kids should get their hands on a MakerBot. Are you a parent? Share your stories with us in the comments!

Kids getting a good look at a MakerBot Replicator last week at SXSW

Here’s a nice quick read for your second third cup of coffee this morning. A group of undergrads and grad students at Stanford who came together in a mechanical engineering class are using their tools and knowledge to open minds of Bay Area students.

And are you surprised to hear they use 3D printing to do the job? MFA student Eugene Korsunskiy:

Our whole point is that manipulating matter with your hands is how you get a sense of empowerment that you can change the world around you. … There’s a lot of high-level education policymakers who in theory claim to agree that the future of the country depends on a workforce that’s creative…but no one’s doing anything about it. … As [they]’re talking about how creativity needs to be expanded, shop classes are being cut…so we decided: “We are going to do something about this.”

The team lets young students design their ideas in Autodesk 123D and print them on the spot. Can you imagine what it would have been like to have that at your disposal when you were a kid? And to the point, we’re not talking about only advanced high school kids. The younger the better, it seems.

 Working with sixth graders and Yahoo! executives, the team was surprised to find that the younger students were more creative.

“It’s really sad to see what happens between those ages that really squashes any semblance of fearless, creative endeavors,” Korsunskiy said.

Fearless is right.

A few shots from SXSW 2012, where we’ve been showing off The Replicator.

Look at that texture!

There seems to be a trend in MakerBot land…child sees object, child wants different object, child asks parent for object, parent designs and prints object, parent uploads design to Thingiverse, much rejoicing.

Some young ones approached their father, sconine, after seeing the ever popular octopus, and wanted a starfish. Taking the challenge, sconin enlisted SketchUp to produce these beautiful (great color choices!) sea stars. Using the properties of MakerBot printing, the texture on these fish is most convincing. Not content with completely flat starfish, sconine tried heating up the starfish while resting on some rocks, and the results are pretty remarkable. Have a look yourself and try to convince yourself they wouldn’t look real just a few feet away. Just try.

So now you can find starfish on the sea floor at almost four miles down, or just across your desk on your MakerBot.

Untitled by sconine

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