 Thank you so much for joining us today. On behalf of Public Knowledge I'd like to welcome you to 3DDC 2016. My name is Courtney Duffy and I am the Arts and Technology Policy Fellow at Public Knowledge, a position which is co-sponsored by New York City based Fractured Atlas and which is made possible through the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. I've had the opportunity to take over the reins of 3DDC this year and I can tell you although I am biased that we have a truly engaging day in store and we're really thrilled that you're with us. You may not know this but 3DDC 2016 marks the event's fifth birthday. By a show of hands is there anyone here who was in attendance for year one? Great so we've got all new faces I love that. Five years of bringing together members of the 3D printing community with DC policy makers right here on Capitol Hill. It remains the only event of its kind. To help mark that important milestone we expanded the event this year to include a day of advocacy training and congressional visits for members of the 3D printing community. The advocates colleagues of yours honed their advocacy skills yesterday and did the 3D printing industry proud. Before introducing our panels I'd like to take a moment to express our sincere gratitude to our sponsors and the congressional maker caucus without whom this event would not take place so if we could give them a round of applause. Introducing our panels I'd like to take a few moments to get some housekeeping things underway. We've got a dynamic panel programming series lined up for today which really illustrates the wide range of industries that 3D printing community touches. Our STEAM education panel will kick things off followed by a panel on 3D printing and the environment, social impact, bridging the workforce skills gap and the arts. We encourage you to engage in the conversation on social media using hashtag 3D DC 2016 and the network and password to connect to Wi-Fi are here on the screen. Following the panels which wind down at three o'clock we have got an interactive 3D printing reception in the Rayburn cafeteria which is right on this floor just around the corner. So we've got catering, we've got drinks and of course we've got 3D printing and I don't know what else you could ask out of your Thursday night so it would be really great. So without further ado I will turn things over to my colleague Chris Lewis who is the VP of Government Affairs at Public Knowledge and he will get things underway with our 3D printing and STEAM education panel. Enjoy. Good morning thank you Courtney. Let's have our first panel make their way up here as well you guys know you already got the names here and we'll get started. This is the second time we've been able to have a panel on STEAM and education and the 3D printing industry and it's a great topic because just tremendous uses going on in our schools and our libraries and our communities around education and we've got a fantastic panel some folks are printing, some new exciting panelists so it's for a big group conversation. You should have on your outline your program for the day Twitter handles for everyone so please feel free to keep the conversation going online. I'm going to introduce our panelists and they are going to give us some introductory remarks about education and STEAM education and then we'll have a conversation so think about whatever questions you'd be interested in talking about related to education and 3D printing and maker spaces and as we engage in conversation I'll just call on you and you can identify yourself when we can keep conversation going. So our panel is up here and so I will go from my right to left here first on the very end we have Lawrence Sloik who is the design evangelist for education at Shapeways a 3D printing company. Next to her we have a brother and sister team that we're really excited to have here two of our 3D printing students Becky and John Button and they are very experienced engineer and 3D printers at a very young age we're excited to hear what they have to say. Right next to me we have we have Joseph Williams who is Director of Instructional and Information Technology at Paris Union High School in California one of our returning panelists and then next to him our other returning panelists on education is a Sophia Giorgio who is a CEO and Chief Designer of the Morphe company. Actually I always get this wrong is Morphe the name of the company or is the name of the app? Everybody who knows education they know Morphe as a great education app that 3D printing space so that's our panel and I'm gonna ask I'm gonna ask Lauren to kick us off here on the end and just talk a bit about how broadly we're seeing the landscape of 3D printing use in education and and how that's been changing over time so Lauren why don't you kick us off. Thank you so much Chris hi everyone it's great to be here and it's really I'm so excited to talk about this topic that sometimes I get a little overwhelmed they even ask Chris like what points we want to hit today and I think the most important thing to realize right now is that this is a really a very early transitionary time for applying 3D printing in the education space for one the thing that I've experienced the most through my work at Shapeways as the design of Angela's for education is that I work with teachers and students at all levels from K through 12 to university and beyond and I found that instructors and students are essentially learning along together right now there is no and yeah I'm good I'm getting so it's it's kind of a communal learning experience and I'm truly hope that that we retain that spirit as the industry and as the applications for this technology solidify because I think that is a major element of steam and STEM education the fact that teachers go transitioning from being the the all knowing all all seeing leader of the room to the assistant and the helper of the students pursuing their own interests and building their own projects by applying the stuff that the teacher helps them learn and so I think the the experience that everyone's having in the classroom right now around this technology is one that we should try to preserve with the way we structure classes the way we structure grading I'm a huge proponent of the the open portfolio application process and in lieu of test scores and things like that and so you know keeping that in mind throughout applying this in any field that you end up teaching is going to be a huge boon for students down the road it's not about buying the latest machine or or getting the latest technology in fact I made a comment that seemed to resonate with people about technology classrooms in the 90s when I was in high school and they would buy all these computers and spend a lot of money and then two years later they'd be idle or slow or our date and I'm a little biased because the company that I work for is a 3d printing service but we take on the responsibility of running these complex machines and giving you access to printing so that's the other piece of the puzzle that I'd love for people to keep in mind is like just get your hands on this stuff in any way possible with tablet devices with a mobile device laptops and of course with education discounts most of the industry recognizes that this is important but I think the the other thing to overcome is this preciousness about printing printing that first model is only the first step very long process of developing new ideas so don't be precious about that first print get it out of the machine and into your hand as soon as possible because the learnings that happen when you get those ideas into your hand are indescribable truly I cannot give people words or instructions that that translate to what you experience when you get a piece that you've designed finally in your hand and feel it for the first time so that is my stance access and a spirit of co-learning so yeah thanks for being here okay Becky let's start with you and John and I'd love for you guys to talk a bit about your experience in the classroom the programs you've been in what you've actually been doing with 3d printing and what you've been learning I know you've got some examples here so feel free to talk about this or whichever one of you wants to go first okay my name is Becky and I'm a freshman in the Commonwealth Governor's School and I've been a maker since fourth grade during fourth grade it took a Saturday Fab Lab class at UVA and that's where I saw the first 3d printer when I saw it when I 3d printing at first seemed very like unattainable foreign because at the time 3d printers were still very expensive in seventh grade I joined the first robotics team and I knew I wanted more so I got I had I had got involved with the enable project and I I made a remix of Steve Woods hand so I went to this makerspace and I had no idea like where to get started and but I didn't know that they had a 3d printer in the makerspace so I go over to the corner where all these people are sitting and just say I want to get involved right and the person there there was a person there that was ecstatic to get me like involved it's so much so that he ended up giving me his thing a maddox 3d printer and ever since that point I have been obsessed and so now during my middle school career they always had an enshrined 3d printer in the school's library and close in this glass enclosure like nobody touched it like nobody knew how to work it was just sitting there collecting that in eighth grade I asked if I could run the printer and they were like yeah sure just you know we want to like enter something in this competition and so I ended up printing the parts for them and I'm glad to say that now the school has six 3d printers and a mentoring a group of eighth graders that all know how to run the 3d printers and maintain them and give me model so hi I'm John Button I'm from Caroline County Virginia I go to Bowling Green Elementary and so these are some of things we made and we did not make these through school at all so these right here are ice models so this is ice 1c sorry ice 1h this is every day ice so that you'd find in a snowflake things like that this is ice from sea this is what you find in the bottom of the glacier it's really dense this is ice when the size 16 this is what you find what neon gas are introduced to when the ice being formed so it creates these little pentagonal cages around it so it's when you take the neon gas so you're left with a nice model so these right here are math models that we though we printed for the Virginia Tech master apartment and so we print you so you can visualize what math actually looks like it feels like in your hand so this right here is a gear we made for our FTC robot and so we made so after so we made this because so the gear so the metal gears that you can buy for FTC are really expensive so we decided to make these plastic ones and after a while of use we figured out that ABS doesn't hold up very well on robots so yeah we ended up switching back to about a year's after a while and this right here is a three-year printed drone so we used a three-year printed chassis right here and used carbon fiber tubing so for the wings and see all of this right here is Zima X5 parts which is a thank you for sharing all right I'm sure John you guys you guys hang out all day so we can have those on display Joe you're our resident educator here and have spent time in the classroom and now hopefully they'll prick them why don't you give us your perspective on on how you've been working with students and so for this I think I'm going to give you two things I'm going to tell you a little bit about Paris Union High School District and myself but I'm also going to dovetail more of what the students just told you and kind of maybe background it in some edu speak and policy speak on why it's important so prior to my current position I was a high school English teacher so I'm extremely proud that this is steam education because I was a humanities major and there is a place for humanities majors in engineering trust me there is and what we're doing on our campuses is we're building maker spaces and not only maker spaces as far as a dedicated location for people to make we want all our classrooms that have maker spaces we want hacker spaces and tinker spaces and and we know that this is an important part of a constructivist model of education an experiential model of education and it's important that myself as the director of instructional and info tech that we provide the time the space and the resources for this to be successful because you can't just drop a 3d printer into a classroom and say well I've arrived and I can tell you a little bit about what Becky was talking about that enshrined printer I tell admin that the most expensive technology you can purchase is the one you don't use so if you put all that money out and you don't use it then that is the most expensive technology you can purchase but if it's costly or in some people's estimation it's costly and the students use the hell out of it then that is well worth it and and specifically for the the projects that John worked on as a teacher a lot of times there's a habit to lecture to do the didactic for people to read and especially in math students need a mental model of what's going on for linear algebra and other things they need a mental model to really conceptualize it and with the models that he has there they're able to actually touch it and have a tactile experience and see it in reality and especially with the ice structures they can read about it and they can they can know something and they could know how those ice structures behave but what they have there now is he's demonstrated a deeper understanding of those ice structures and also provided a mental model which is important so why 3d printing is important isn't just the 3d printing it is providing design thinking solving problems having grit sticking to it having real-world applications and it's not just the end game of the 3d printing it's the characteristics and attributes we can build in our students to be able to get to that final point which these two students have demonstrated thank you Joe and Sophie you know you've been building tools and that's for students to use everybody thank you so much for being here today my name is Sophia and my team and I create 3d design application called morphe it allows people of all ages and skill levels to design in 3d for touch so you can use an iPad and rates coming soon we also have a desktop version which is available for Mac but we're also going to be bringing a Windows version out soon but we're in a lot of schools now we didn't design it specifically for education I started working on this more than five years ago the iPad had just come out and I really wanted to design a touch of designing in 2d but I didn't know how to design in 3d and so I really did start designing for myself this program and then we developed it over time we're in 96 countries right now downloaded we have a lot of schools using it we're in steam vehicles that are going out to different schools just in terms of education one big trend I'm seeing and I know Joe mentioned this and also Lauren mentioned this is people coming in from this aspect of the arts so people who have no background in technology coming in and feeling comfortable beginning to design in 3d and starting to experiment with their ideas and then we also have people who have no artistic background we're strictly science and math interested in science and math but who are infusing design you know the bigger concept of design not just artistic design but even a mindset and it's across subjects and across grade levels we have kids as young as pre-k using the application and then we have university students we have you know we have designers we have non-designers we have people who are non-explicit using it and self-directed learners through libraries and through maker spaces which are this whole world of learning that's happening also outside the classroom and all together this whole ecosystem that's that's been happening in the US and beyond is really training people to think about how to experiment with their ideas and get into the practice of creating so so that's been really exciting for us on the on the technology side so please feel free to raise your hand ask questions we do want to engage folks in here what you want to hear about from our panelists so if you don't ask any I have a few I can ask as well but we have one right here we'll just start please tell us who you are where you're from hi my name is Heidi Shepherd I am working to sort of draw out the national downward for the arts and this manufacturing extension partnership project I'm working on has to do with connecting desktop designers with many small medium-sized manufacturers my question to you is what ways is the design thinking process being integrated into the process of learning 3d printing right this you can learn just sort of the nuts and bolts of it but what about the design thinking process is that also being part of the education system I can tell you yes it is and not just for teachers we put our classified staff in our division in our district do design thinking making type of activities and why this is important is this we're a high school district by the time we get the students it seems that education has beaten out of them the natural curiosity and they're just used to just sitting there and they're not they're not used to taking their imagination to some ends and there's some false starts when you start this because when you have a maker space a hacker space in a tinker space in the beginning the students would just sit there and say okay well just tell me what to do where's the recipe and this and the teachers were the same way and we realized early on this you know we need to build their capacity to be able to go through some design thinking models and so we would put them through some design thinking models instead of and also including design thinking models that build empathy and what that did is it gave the teachers and the students the tools of thought to solve their problems because again just making a jump from you know it's vogue to say the factory model where kids are in rows and columns and we hate that anyway but that's where they came from and now we're throwing them into an ecosystem that is foreign to them and we needed to build up their capacity to use some thinking processes to solve problems and not just for teachers and students for everybody on our campus everybody on our campus are educators and they all need to have that same ability or yes of course so I also do a part-time education teaching at Parsons School of Design so we're actually in the process of integrating design thinking into almost every major at the new new school University and I think that is because the complex problems that we are set to solve in the next 50 years require that people go outside of their areas of expertise so it's it's very much recognized in the education space at least in the post-secondary and I when I give lectures to introductory 3d printing I always bring up the design thinking cycle the iterative cycle of starting within a concept creating a prototype testing that prototype evaluating the results and going back to the drawing board it's built in to learning how to translate a mathematically screen-based design into a physical object you are not going to be able to anticipate everything that happens when you translate from pixels to molecules right so it's sort of you can't avoid it and whether people recognize that design thinking is a is a practice that they have to teach they end up talking about it anyways so I would say that it's almost more important to just help people recognize that it's it's a step in a larger process and and it's a circular narrative I mean I ask you guys like did all of your friends work the first time yeah so you guys yeah you know all about that how many versions did you do um this one isn't even perfect this one's starting to come off the bed I just was so big yes this part isn't finished either I can't tell and the argument the argument this parts they like they could not print successfully like we had this we had to make these parts bigger and these aren't still work perfect right so right there design thinking the other the other thing I was gonna say the design thinking is very important but there are many other modes of thinking too and this whole this technology allows people to experiment with many many different tools and many many different ways of thinking and if we can help people learn to be more curious and experimental and cross disciplines which I think is going to be not just essential for kids it's essential for all of us so including the teachers maybe you just you know but an art teacher but now all of a sudden this printer is in your room and you know maybe you want to experiment with biology and you know create up a bio printer you can do that so I think that it's um it allows this experimentation in a way that's affordable now this is a new just like what John said I'm very impressed by let's say I'm a teacher to John I always give people a post-coach in a way that now we have this science in you know in mathematics but most of the students are scared of mathematics how you be able to move mathematics into the ecosystem of this because if the students have as a teacher teaching I have three students in my class student A, student B, student C, student A these are students that are extremely intelligent student B, student C, not that they're not intelligent but because of their societal environment now they want to be part of this like what John said so it is a truism and probably not just our district that students struggle in areas of math and especially we're a high school district that also has a middle school so we do have seventh and eighth graders and and those students also struggle with math but I'm capitalize on your point that they're highly interested in these maker spaces and hacker spaces and tinker spaces they're highly interested in that and you know what motivates them to get to those spaces is that when they're in there and they realize that they do have some skill gaps in math and when they're highly motivated in that environment what do you think they do they work to improve that skill gap in mathematics and we provide them their opportunities not only in the maker space we're a district that's one to one with Chromebooks and there aren't any cards they take them home every day including summer pretty much they could get that device when they're a sophomore and walk off the stage with it where they're a senior if the government would allow me to do that but I'm not allowed to so we do need to improve their skills in math but we we aren't helping them by by beating it into them we're not helping them by putting them in rows and columns in a factory model classroom in the maker spaces and the hacker spaces and the tinker spaces we have seen students deliberately work to improve their mathematical skills with a level of autonomy that helped them progress and so we've captured them that way we've captured their attentiveness that way yes please just on the software stuff when kids and adults to open our app it's all math you know you see a sphere here's now you know they're using it to calculate surface area volume there are many many ways that you can teach math through design and through a lot of these 3d modeling programs and then in turn when they're printed where they can actually hold them and then fully understand the concepts and apply them so I think that there are many many math applications it's just a way of engaging the students that they retain it and they do retain a lot better when they're creating it that's what we found it here and then we'll come to you so i work with tech shop with a big maker space in dcrm um i my question is in regards to professional development for teachers um what we're what we're seeing in different areas of the country is a learning gap within the instructors themselves so this technology is fantastic and as a maker space we try and welcome as many teachers and students as possible but public versus private north Carolina versus virginia nor the virginia versus southern virginia there are huge differences amongst these teachers and as we try and give them access to 3d printers um the teachers themselves need to be able to use it we need to understand how to communicate that to the kids i mean that's how a 3d printer glass box happens so my question is not just what are you seeing in the work that you do as far as offering opportunities to teachers who are oftentimes coming out of their own pockets for professional development but also what would you like to see in assistance for these instructors who you know graduated from school themselves maybe 20 years ago and so that wasn't available to them at the time and now all the time they've been there next step start applying the areas where i've seen success applied it's usually a an environment of co-learning for teachers as well i mean obviously there are aspects to professional development that we need to create space for so what i'd like to see is policymakers and education reform embrace the idea of an open classroom of a more fluid structure for curriculum and giving the teacher's space to as i learned at some of the many technology companies i've worked for it's okay to say that you don't know but that is a starting point to go and find out along with your students and i think we need to make that okay for teachers right now like i said it's this burden of being the all-knowing leader of the classroom you can still be a leader but you need to embrace the mindset that the students are in and recognize that you're learning together so i think i think that what we can do for the teachers in that regard is make that a safe state to run your classroom in as opposed to knowing the answer before the students even ask the question thank you um i definitely agree with board when when this happened that we started the 3d printing program that after school at my school um we all became teachers like we we all um we're able to learn learn together and i think it was more beneficial to us all to not just have one person who knew it all but everybody had a thorough working knowledge as opposed to just like here's what it is you have to figure it out i can add uh go ahead that uh a lot of times in education when we talk about professional development what's sad is that some districts are talking about professional development like it's one thing and it's one type and districts need to have a robust offerings of professional development for teachers a continuum of offerings including collaborative learning including release time i can tell you a model that i would hope that eventually we would have is a model that we just partnered up with code.org for computer science at classroom and it's an awesome opportunity for that now if we could translate into the same aspect of partnerships for uh for 3d printing that would be an added resource we also have a lot of opportunities in my district because i know as an administrator my job is to provide time space and resources for teachers to do their job and a high performing and a high achieving teacher if i provide them some level of autonomy on their professional development and then fund it and make it an opportunity for them they'll go out and get it and so that's what we need to do to make sure that happens there's a question right here in the movement from stem to steam are curious what are some projects or approaches in this phase that you've seen uh is most interesting in that would most interestingly converge the humanities and the engineering field ideally specifically for non-visual fields like literature or philosophy or sociology and you tell us who you are sir um my name is philip my background is in cognitive sciences and uh educational technologies and i'm currently designing three printers and three printing curricula wonderful you'd like to take that on our english teacher will yes so before we go into that i i often talk to teachers what is the role of the english teacher in the stem building what is the role of the english teacher in the steam program and uh are we going to focus more on the nuances available are we going to focus more on chaucer or are we going to prepare kids for the realities of reading and writing that they're going to have in their steam program and i would tell you that we're going to balance that as a as an english teacher i'm going to balance teaching them sort of the canon and letting them have a nuance to their understanding of literature and allegories but i need to prepare them to read and write expository type of activities that they're that this going to pay dividends either in their career or college and so where where do i see steam for the humanities a lot of times it's in a larger project for instance you know if you're with a large team and if you're in industry and if you're in industry google or anybody you're going to have engineers and you're going to have social media people and you're going to have people that are going to prep that 90-second elevator speech and we have people that are going to write the business plan and there and there's people as part of the team that are good with colors and aesthetics and there's people that are part of the team that are good with coding and and all those other things so i see it in a larger team type of project where some of those skills are right in the wheelhouse of the literature student or the art student or you know or the engineer or the programmer and i more of a project team-based structure is where i see it paying dividends just to add to that too any time i'm helping someone set up a new software or a new piece of hardware uh i always dread opening up the instructions because usually the first thing i can tell is oh god these instructions are written by the engineers so there is a huge need for communication capabilities whether it's visual or written in the technology field in order to convey some of the complexity that you're working with and what a difference um well-made instructions well-made explanations well-made demonstrations can make uh it can make or break a three-hour classroom block where they spend the entire time trying to troubleshoot an extruder or they've troubleshot the extruder in a few moments and are now printing you know some new projects so yeah so yeah yeah just quickly also that um we have people who are using um 3d design to tell stories um uh you don't have to just print you could print we have people printing out for example um they'll take a shakespeare play and turn it into a game and print out characters for that game and that will be taking things or we'll have someone do a diorama of uh you know something from you know like maybe van Gogh's you know a bedroom you know a scene from one of his uh one of his paintings or we can all we also have seen um people do a lot of uh stop motion which is not printing it's using design which is also part of this whole continuum of understanding how to visualize um and that is needed in every field and in every profession so um if we can teach um people to do that then we're doing a great job just reassuring that the dioramas I was doing 30 years ago I'll show you we have a dinosaur diorama that was done by um by an elementary school student which is extraordinary um and uh you can you can print it or you can you can make it a stop motion and help them move around and even have music um we have a new question here I'm going to go to the first so question for all of you uh hacker spaces and maker spaces what could we do to be more relevant directly to the education on community question and you are Matthew Hines uh director of large hack PC thank you um thank you you guys actually did some of your work John you did your work in was it in a hacker space it wasn't in school right no yeah I think just like being there um the the coolest thing I've I've met like crazy cool people at our maker space like just like having mentors there um was like the what's the biggest part of me starting like having the person there to give me like let me just use their pretty fair and keep it like like um I know that I can always get my questions answered if I ever go to a space um and that's often more often than not I'm going like when I go to my maker space it's to get some questions answered because I have no idea how to do it thank you I'd have to agree with thank you because every time when I go to my maker space and I just bring whatever I'm working on I always I always end up with a finished product at the end I always I always get help somehow what's the name of your maker space hack rba but to like answer your question basically our hacker space they have an open hack night where just everybody brings their stuff and we just talk to each other we talk about everything and usually it's it's a very interesting experience yeah I've been helping the urban assembly maker academy as a public school in New York City develop their their fab lab and it's going to be open I think for the fall of this year it's really exciting but you know we're very focused on getting it out with all the right tools for a model shop and that and that but I was really adamant and I had support from my colleagues at Parsons that the equally important to getting all of the right technology in there was building a community element that soft element of people talking to each other sharing ideas and we've been holding off launching the space because we're looking for someone to run it who can host that type of environment and be the sort of Willy Wonka of the fab lab and show people around and get them connected to the right people and I think that's important for the sustainability of any maker space anywhere in the world it's not just the machines it's the people connecting to other people who have similar interests and want to help people learn so when I was speaking with the students over there and they were talking and especially talking with their mother also about when they were working on their projects in the beginning what I kept hearing was it was the space that they were going to out of school and I'm glad that those spaces are there but what we want to build on our campuses is we want we want on our campuses it to be like a learning incubator we want there to be locations on campus not just hacker spaces and tinker spaces but other locations I want there to be robust digital tools and physical tools I want there to just not be a coverage of Wi-Fi I want saturation of Wi-Fi and in the hacker spaces and the maker spaces this is like a learning incubator where the students can come in and they can and they can iterate and they can do all kinds of things and your schools need to be part of the community so as a learning incubator this learning will spill out into the community to solve real-world problems and so and and it's for on our campuses it needs to be part of some of the some of the formal structure of what we do but really making and hacking is more of an informal type of learning experience so we need to provide formal and informal learning and then as far as mentorship goes if you haven't had a chance to look at the White House's making an education type of policy there's one of the pillars is having having a maker in residence or makers in residences and these are like mentors and they could there could be a nuance to that also you could have people that come after school that have a specific acumen for art or engineering and we need to build into like I said we want our our maker spaces to be incubators that spill out into the community but we want our community to come into our schools as maker in residences and be able to work with our students on stuff that they're passionate about and so I'm happy that there are these maker spaces but I want that on our campuses that's where I want them please yeah um well I wanted to say that I came out of a hacker space hack Manhattan which is on 14th street New York City I didn't know anything about 3D printing although I knew how to design and that gave me the community of someone named Dave Reeves over there a great friend who taught me how to use the ultimaker original printer which I prototyped a lot of the models in our in our application that we were building at the time I'm also a member of Fat Cat Fab Lab which is also in Manhattan but I've but I've gone to many I've been members of several now in different parts of the world even because this is a global phenomenon this as as Joe was saying this sort of informal education which creates these environments now for for teachers I think because I think that was the original question how can how can teachers participate in this environment they already are in so many ways but if there are ways that you could potentially host professional development out of these centers and make it priced accordingly so that it's affordable to them um yesterday we spent time um meeting with members of um of congress and their and their staff and um you know some of them were surprised to hear about some of the maker spaces that are right here in DC you know including yours there's um there's the Fab Lab in DC there's Tech Shop um there there are many and so I think getting the word out um to the teacher communities and you know even through the libraries we'll do a lot and hosting pd sessions and even just showing them how to operate the different machines like here's here's an intro to laser cutting here's an intro to 3d printing here's an intro to even you know some of the adobe software some of that some of the 2d software that they can eventually convert to 3d if they don't want to start with 3d and then of course graduate to 3d or or start with 3d because the only way to learn all this stuff is by doing it and by by just sitting in front of it and you're going to make mistakes um some people don't but you you take it out you're bound to you're bound to spend time doing it and um it's really enjoyable to the learning we could go on and on I hear we have time for one more question and we have a new question in the mirror back here michael stone i'm a former padlock director of the high school intensity and i understand fellow here uh this is awesome work that you guys are doing uh i don't mean to be a downer on a huge 3d printing in school supporter i'm curious how do we prevent 3d printing from becoming like having the same doldrums that interactive whiteboards have gone through where it was an amazing tech they have a lot of value to offer but have oftentimes just become an expensive chalkboard right in the classroom how do we make sure that 3d printing doesn't become the next expensive you know uh inkjet printer how do we prevent that that from happening is the smooth tool to push the broken record over here but like creating that that community and that environment that supports it and makes it not um an exclusive object that is precious and kept in a glass box so keep returning to um is is a huge part of it and it's it's difficult to monitor that because it's not on paper it's not an object that you can purchase it's it's an act of the group at that institution making a point to prioritize spending time in the space and using it on the flip side the tech the tech industry and i count shapeways as part of that has a long way to go to make this technology more approachable we're using tools that were never intended for 3d printing you're using animation software engineering software manufacturing software but they never really incorporated some of the needs of these machines so you're going to see i'm hoping because i'm talking to these folks on a daily basis some vast improvement in the next few years on software you know autodesk has made a commitment to making all of their software i mean industry standard fusion 360 auto cad all that stuff free for students from kindergarten through if you are still a grad student you have an edu address you can get it for free so they understand the access point shapeways we have a student existing student discount education grants for university students and lots of small project work with people just to get people that access that hands-on feel so that it doesn't it's not this foreign sort of new replacement for something that can do some other way but it it's going to take a village for sure anything else i definitely agree with lauren like the whole open access democratization thing will definitely like if if there are the people it'll stay relevant i yeah very good and i i can't help but mention uh joe was talking he touched on briefly the access not only to the technology but to broadband and to uh which is near and dear to public knowledge's heart um and you know congress talks about regularly here as a focus in their tech policy yeah just quickly i think that um as someone who's designing technology it has to be dynamic um technology is evolving as we are evolving and so i think that we have to be responsive to that i think in terms of reprinting there is a lot there are a lot of exciting things happening on the on the software side but um even on the materials side there and there's so many different techniques where you can go from something that's plastic make mold out of it turn it into something metal or you know using other you know all sorts of other materials and i think that um one of the things we need to do in the education world is to expose our our teachers and even the administrators to all the different options and how they can experiment with them because that's not just having a printer sitting there printing in plastic which can be incredibly cool but you know even beyond that and these printers should not be used it's like photocopy machines where um you can do that it's fine maybe for a little bit but you know after a while if you're not designing anything or creating anything or adding anything to it it will get boring it'll be you know a two thousand dollar copier great all right uh this is a great start to our day and won't you help me thank our panelists for coming out this morning