Youth practitioners worldwide have been recognizing the educational benefits of digital fabrication-based activities. Young people involved in such activities develop a range of transferrable skills and attitudes, for example maker mindset, entrepreneurial spirit, which are beneficial vis a vis their personal, professional and educational growth. Digital fabrication based activities also represent a powerful means of engaging young people in a situation of social or digital exclusion and to reactivate them socially and psychologically. Commonly, digital fabrication activities targeting young people are run within schools or places for digital fabrication (ex. Fablabs). They usually require costly and specific equipment, thus the portion of young people interfacing with the universe of digital fabrication is, presently, very much limited. The purpose of this partnership is to open up digital fabriation activities to an ever wider portion of young people, for them to enjoy the education benefits of such initiatives. In order to achieve this goal, the project consortium aims to produce a set of educational tools on digital fabrication that will not be affected by material constraints, insofar as they will be deployable in any circumstances (including street youth work) and will not require expensive and special equipment such as computer numeric control machines. The Open educational resource we are envisaging to develop will serve the following purposes: - Enhance youth soft skills (cross cultural team-work, entrepreneurship, interdisciplinary mindset, creativity) - Enhance technical skills: artistic skills, digital skills, STEM skills - Challenge digital exclusion of disadvantaged youth - Develop critical attitudes towards technology - Build interest for careers and studies in maths science and engineering - Enhance social inclusion of disadvantaged youth, by encouraging them to get involved in communities/places for digital fabrication/DIY - Improve employability prospects - Sensitize youth organizations to new methods and approaches to youth work ACTIVITIES - production of a cutting-edge educational kit consisting of 4 modules : a curriculum to run activities on digital fabrication in non formal educational contexts, a set of appealing physical supports for sensitizing people to digital fabrication, an online digital design library and collaborative platform, a set of low budget DIY digital fabrication prototyping machines. - Pilot tests of the educational kit in youth centres, social centres, libraries, places for digital fabrication, schools. IMPACT - fostering citizens' movements for digital and maker culture, especially in countries where this domain is underdeveloped - development of educational workshops on digital fabrication in the particpating organization countries - opening up of opportunities for young people to get involved in local movements for digital /maker culture - innovation in youth work and increased confidence in ICT based activities targeting youth DISSEMINATION - publication of project s results on 2 French National magazines for DIY and digital culture - promotion of intellectual outputs at various public events for digital /maker culture in Italy and France (ex. Rome Maker Faire, Toulouse Hackerspace factory) - launching of KA1 youth workers training to educate them on the use of the educational kit on digital fabrication - publication of intellectual outputs on a number of online platforms for digital/maker culture (makezine.com, instructables.com, wikifab.org) - involvement of local partner organizations active in the field of scientific and digital mediation and non-formal education - dissemination via the French national network for digital mediation
FabEdu is a european cooperation project that aims to bring innovation in the field of youth work. The initiative is lead by Digijeunes, in partnership with Vectorealism (Italy), Fablab Pau (France), the municipality of Alba Iulia (Romania), and Combustible Numérique (France). OBJECTIVES Over a period of 18 months the project cosortium produced a set of open educational resources on the topic of digital fabrication. The project’s deliverables are expected to facilitate the implementation of educational digital science workshops across Europe, thus contributing to improving digital literacy among youth, and challenging the digital divide. RESULTS We have produced a number of tutorials and physical objects to enable youth workers across Europe to launch their own hands-on workshops on digital fabrication. Our educational resources rely exclusively on free and open source hardware/software, and are dvided into 3 modules : - Introductory activites on digital fabrication - Hands-on activities on 3D modeling, 3D printing, laser cutting, 3D scanning, and traditional DIY - Tutorials on how to build and use mini diy cnc machines The complete set of outputs is available on : www.fabeduproject.e, as well as on Instructables.com : just type « Digijeunes » in the search bar COMMUNICATION Our communication campaign covered all participating organizations’ countries, thus reacing several hundreds youth practictioners and young people across France, Romania and Italy. The FabEdu team was notably involved in a number of public events on maker and digital culture such as the Toulouse Mini Maker Faire, or the Manifattura Milano. If you’d like to comment on our work or get in touch with the FabEdu team don’t hesitate to contact us at : [email protected] You can also gain further insights into our communicatio efforts by searching for #FabEdu on social networks, or by visiting the project’s facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/fabeduproject/ LASERCUT STACKED EINSTEIN To get a taste of the educational ressources we’ve developed, you can check out the lasercut stacked object tutorial. This activity is about assembling a 3D item made of cardboard or MDF, to understand how 3D printing works. https://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Cut-Stacked-Einstein/