That's the idea behind a recently opened fab lab at
Castilleja School in Palo Alto. Thursday afternoon in Elaine Middleman's
Biology and Economics of Cancer class, seniors Suzie Quackenbush and Christine
Herrmann, both 18, were working on what they called a cancer-screening box, a
device that would allow researchers to view slides with cells. After three days
working at the lab, they had a cardboard prototype held together with blue
tape.
"Eventually it will be made of thin wood, with metal
hinges," Quackenbush said. "It'll look much better than this."
It will have to work, too. Middleman said the students are being graded on
"producing a functional product."
Distance learning, YouTube, the iPad -- new technology is
helping transform education in many ways. But the Bourn Lab, a fabrication lab
built especially for middle- and high-schoolers, aims to get students to create
tangible things.
The Bourn Lab is part of the FabLab@School program, which
was created by Paulo Blikstein, an assistant professor at Stanford who has a
similar lab on campus and who started one in Moscow. Blikstein was a master's
student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology around the time a fab lab was
created there, he said.
Exploring vs. lecturing
Other fab labs were born out of that MIT effort. The Fab Lab
San Diego, for example, has programs for adults as well as school-age students,
said its director, Katie Rast.
But when Blikstein came to Stanford, he wanted to bring a
lab to school kids. Blikstein, an engineer with a Ph.D. in education, wants to
re-create the role of labs in schools, which he says have become "places
where invention and creativity go to die" because typical science
experiments require students to do not much more than follow directions. His
goal is less lecturing, more exploration.
The Bourn Lab has a couple of 3-D printers, a 3-D scanner, a
laser-cut printer and other equipment that have enabled one seventh-grade
history class, for example, to re-create models of Leonardo da Vinci's
machines. A revolving bridge, an aerial screw, a catapult and other laser-cut
wood models of the great inventor's machines now sit in Castilleja's library
for all to admire.
"There's a lot of engineering in history,"
Blikstein said. "The lab allows history, engineering, math to be taught in
an integrated way."
After seeing some of the impressive work the students did
with the Leonardo project, one parent asked how much physics the girls learned,
said Nanci Kauffman, the head of Castilleja, a private school for sixth-
through 12th-grade girls.
"My thing was, 'How much more did they learn about da
Vinci?' " than if they had simply heard lectures from their history
teacher or read a book, she said.
Parent volunteer Diego Fonstad pointed out plastic figures
made by students in a 9th-grade geometry class. "The girls went out of
control, way beyond what we expected," he said, pointing to a 3D-printed
model of R2-D2 and other figures. "All designed mathematically," he
adds.
Kauffman said she's hoping the lab, which had its
ribbon-cutting in March, fosters a risk-taking culture at the school.
"Girls and women struggle with that," she says. "Here they can
be willing to get behind a half-baked idea and try."
Hands-on high tech
Fifteen out of the 60 teachers at Castilleja -- representing
every department -- have been through a lab training headed by Blikstein, and
more teachers will take part. In addition to training and regularly meeting
with the teachers, Blikstein is heading a team of about 20 people at Stanford
to study how well the FabLab@School concept works. "Research is the best
way to ensure it's going to continue," he said.
The equipment for the lab cost about $60,000 and was funded
by the school, the Edward E. Ford Foundation and the Doug Bourn memorial fund.
Bourn, an engineer at Tesla Motors (TSLA), died in a plane crash in East Palo
Alto in 2010 along with two other Tesla employees. Bourn was Castilleja's
robotics mentor.
As part of its partnership with Blikstein, Castilleja also
is helping with the cost of another school fab lab, at East Palo Alto Academy,
which will open later this year. Blikstein said he's currently talking with
teachers at both schools -- he has worked with teachers at East Palo Alto
Academy for a while, and some of the school's students have been using his
Stanford fab lab regularly -- and envisions having students from the school in
East Palo Alto do joint projects with Castilleja students.
"We want to democratize by expanding to public
schools," Blikstein said. "Society pays attention to high-tech tools.
Putting them in the hands of kids" who otherwise might not be exposed to
them, he said, "that's very valuable."
It's a sentiment echoed by Betsy Corcoran, CEO of Burlingame
startup EdSurge, which aims to provide information about technology in
education. EdSurge is helping shine a spotlight on the learning-by-doing
movement at next weekend's Maker Faire in San Mateo -- where the Bourn Lab will
have a presence.
"What's most compelling and exciting to us -- and
teachers and students -- is when students learn by building," Corcoran
said.
By Levi Sumagaysay, posted 05/11/2012
