To his right is a painted portrait of Charles W. Cook. who graduated from Browning in 1938 and stepped down as headmaster 50 years later. The room is named for him.
The current headmaster, Stephen M. Clement, III, enters the Cook Room, opens the glass door of a bookshelf, and pulls out a white 3D printed bust of himself. Clement had his head scanned at the MakerBot Store in Manhattan last year, on his 25th anniversary as headmaster.
“There were many different celebrations, but I thought this was the coolest,” Clement says.
When Clement became headmaster, in 1988, parents didn’t ask much about what their boys would learn about technology, he says. Today, tours of the K-12 school for parents of prospective students make an obligatory stop at the technology lab, which has a MakerBot Replicator 2X Experimental 3D Printer in the window. “From seeing it as a potential force that might wreck the finances of the school,” Clement says, he has come to see how technology “can open up worlds.”
The video shows Browning’s director of academic technology, Jeremy Sambuca, teaching a class of eighth-graders who designed their own Lego-style pieces how to print them on a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer.
When the eighth-grade boys finish the project, these pieces will be mixed in to the building blocks in lower-school classrooms. Browning’s youngest students get more exposure to 3D printing; the kindergarteners make custom cookie cutters — and then make cookies with them.
With Browning weaving design and engineering principles into its curriculum starting in kindergarten, imagine what these students will be making when they graduate in 2028.
(Cookie cutter photo courtesy The Browning School.)