Nation of Makers

Date

June 18, 2014

Location

The White House, Washington, D.C., United States

Where do I begin?

While trying to write this blog entry, I ran into a problem: Where do I start? Over the last few days, I have seen and interacted with some of brightest and most intelligent minds that the United States has to offer. From 13 year old CEOs of small robotics companies to Bill Nye (yes, the science guy, who actually is a mechanical engineer!), every one of them had taken the time to travel to the nation's capital to deliver a simple message: "Help empower us and we can do great things." I attribute that statement to a man from Maker Faire Africa, Emeka Offar, who brought awareness of Africa's great resource of tinkerers, self-taught engineers, and research scientists in the form of a Makers Faire. I will end this introduction with the same statement that I intend to conclude this blog entry with: "I was inspired to a degree that I have not been inspired before in my life."

The People, the Things, and the Ideas

In the two days I was in Washington, I met some of the most inspirational or amazing people and their creations.

  • A small company run by two sisters, Camille (14) and Genevieve (12), that build robots for museums, competitions, and prototype parts for manufacturers. They got their start because they are inquisitive, beginning with disassembling toys and other things around the house. As they describe it, "We wanted to see how they worked." This was enough to spark their interest in creating a robo company. Their website is beatty-robotics.com.
  • QTechKnow (qtechknow.com) is a company whose CEO is 13 years old. He mainly designs and sells electronics kits to assist people in prototyping their own creations. While I was standing at his table, will.I.am started playing a robot flag game and then offered to buy several of his kits for his nephews and nieces. Absolutely incredible the reach that his need to design and tinker has brought him.
  • The Other Machine Company has developed a small CNC mill product that is capable of cutting printed circuit boards, wood, plastic craft, brass, aluminum, and machining wax. This type of machine is not knew, but they have created a product that can fit on a teacher's desk and is safe for use in a classroom. They cost about the same as a 3D printer ($2,200) and bring an amazing amount of prototyping ability to an elementary school classroom.
  • The National Institute of Health has opened a new website that is a repository of scientific, printable models of biological structures. Imagine how teachers could use this to inexpensively make models that students could hold in their hands and perhaps understand even more about biology than they could through images and textbooks. This is a major leap in terms of the power of 3D printing in the classroom.

Those were four of the many people and products I saw while at the White House. It was an impressive show of "Maker" force, to be sure.

What can the Purdue Polytechnic Institute and Purdue University do to help nurture and empower the Maker that resides in everyone of us?

Some of the older makers at the event had many different degree types; the younger ones, of course, had not even graduated from high school yet! The constant thing I heard from every engineering / technical field was that the exploration they had made into liberal arts had expanded their minds to great degree. They said the equations and formulas of course helped them build their creations, but the thought of them would not have occurred without the human centered design element. The solutions to the issues the inventors were trying to tackle would not have been researched without more of the empathy to the person that would be using their product. That's what makes products successes or failures: they are designed for the people that use them.

The above thinking is one of the core elements of the Polytechnic Incubator: Build with purpose, build with reason, and build for your society and culture. Not every Maker has to build something tangible; sometimes the best acts of "making" come from a culture shift. Our faculty fellows are "makers." We are making a new path for education, one that inspires and instructs. We can give the future makers of the world a college experience that helps them see the whole picture, with a sturdy foundation in science, liberal arts, technology, and engineering. I am excited to see what our own "makers faire" will produce at the end of the first year. I am sure that it will inspire many other universities, K-12 educators, and the world that building things is not just powered with engineering. It's powered with everything.

This trip inspired the above thoughts and many more that will be written about in the months to come. Again, I was inspired to a degree that I have not been inspired before in my life.