Full STEAM Ahead: Blue Ridge Fab Lab and 4-H Partner to Offer 21st-Century Learning—and Wide-Format Printing

Head, heart, hands, and health. Those were the original four development areas around which 4-H was founded way back in 1902. Since then, 4-H has grown into a network of youth organizations with more than six million members in the U.S., all students ages five to 21. We may remember 4-H from county fairs and similar events, and while the original aim of 4-H was to bring agricultural research to the next generation of farmers (the organization is still administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture), it has become a leader in offering STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education—and, in fact, 4-H’s presence at today’s county fairs are just as likely to feature STEM or STEAM (adding “art” into the mix) project competitions as livestock or produce judging.

“I like STEAM instead of STEM because art is an integral component to any innovator,” said Kevin Woolridge, Co-Director of the Blue Ridge/UA 4-H Fab Lab, based in Pinetop-Lakeside, Ariz. In January, 2018, Woolridge opened the new Fab Lab—short for fabrication laboratory—in partnership with 4-H. Roland DGA and Epilog Laser are two sponsors of the lab, and have provided wide-format printing equipment, 3D milling machines, and laser engraving and cutting equipment, among other gear. “Both of those companies have been amazingly generous to the program,” said Woolridge.

The M.O. of the Fab Lab is to offer a hands-on approach to learning. “Basically, what we’re doing is trying to prototype a new service delivery model for STEM education,” explained Woolridge. “For years, 4-H has had a push on trying to increase the amount of STEM and our thought was that by partnering with them and building a Fab Lab with a network of many labs throughout the state, we would then be able to funnel more kids through.” While fab labs have typically been offered by wealthier schools and school districts—and out of reach of the poorer ones—by working with 4-H, Woolridge is able to open STEM training to any student. “We’re a small town in the mountains of Arizona, and we’ve had kids coming from all over the state participating in the program,” he said. “What it boils down to is trying to find a mechanism where we can create a fab lab learning environment that is open to everybody instead of just students from the school it’s situated in.”

More than 200 students pass through the lab each day. During school hours, the Fab Lab is a resource for students at Blue Ridge Unified School District #32, and after school it becomes a 4-H program.

The training is entirely student-directed and is centered around building specific projects, with Woolridge and other staff functioning more as coaches than teachers. And the projects the kids work on are light years beyond making a baking-soda volcano or a spinning model of an atom.

“I had one student who developed a time-of-flight sensor system that’s accurate within 10 centimeters at 200 yards,” said Woolridge. “He used the Arduino platform, and did the coding, the soldering, and the electronics to build it. I have another student that developed an ultrasonic tractor beam. He used the 3D printer to build his parabolic top, and used the electronics to wire the components, and did the coding and the soldering.” After completing a project, students then develop related informational materials—posters, flyers, labels, etc.—and print them on a Roland printer. “The goal is the kids build a project or a prototype that incorporates all the pieces into it,” said Woolridge.

Students don’t have to have any background in any of the elements before setting foot in the Fab Lab. “They come to the class not knowing a single thing about how to make their project,” said Woolridge. “They create a learning plan based upon what they want their end product to be. After they figure out their learning plan, they then go through the tutorials, learn the different software and the tools until they are able to complete their final project. Essentially it’s student-driven, project-based learning where instead of me as the teacher standing in front of them and saying, ‘do this, do this, do this,’ the students have to figure out how to get to their end goal. They're intrinsically motivated to gather the knowledge.”

Even non-STEM-oriented students are able to avail themselves of the Fab Lab. “Our language arts teacher set up a project where students had to read three dystopian novels and after they read the novels, they had to come to the Fab Lab and create their own dystopian world,” said Woolridge. “Once they fabricated it using all the modalities within the lab, they then had to sit down and write a story using their model as the reference to their story.”

Woolridge is a math teacher by training (he also teaches chemistry and physics) and the idea for the Fab Lab came about thanks to a movie. He had seen the 2016 film Hidden Figures, the true story of Katherine Johnson and other African-American mathematicians working for NASA in the early days of the space program. “I thought that would be a great movie to use in a math class, to show some excerpts and teach students where they can go with math,” said Woolridge. “So I started researching it and I landed on the NASA webpage that had an entire project-based learning module on [Johnson’s] life.” He then came across various “NASA Challenges,” undertaken by schools around the country. “I clicked on ‘past winners’ and started researching what those [school] districts have and what our district doesn’t. Every single school that was a past winner that I looked at had a fab lab or a maker space. So that’s kind of where all this got started.”

The Fab Lab only opened in January, so it’s too early to gauge the impact the experience has had on students, but there have been some preliminary success stories. For example, there have already been students who were initially not planning on going to college—headed for vocational school instead—but thanks to their experience in the Fab Lab, are now college-bound.

With their experience running printing equipment, are any students perhaps looking at a career in the graphic arts, or becoming potentially the next generation of Roland customers?

“We’ve had a lot of students come through who, once they use a product, are intently interested in learning more and are starting to carve out a niche,” said Woolridge. “For example, we’re getting ready to open school and we need to do a bunch of awards for the school. So I have a group of students who are sitting down and doing all those awards. That’s part of the neat thing about the Fab Lab: there are so many different modalities in here that any student can find an area that they didn’t necessarily know of and now have sparked an interest in it and are developing skills.”

“It’s flipping education on its head,” he added. “By having kids in the Fab Lab doing everything from bio-mimicry and medical applications to wildlife sciences, to civic engagement activities, it opens up brand new worlds for them. They start making connections with professionals in the community and start learning about professional choices that they’ve never known about before.” And the affiliation with 4-H has opened up these opportunities to any student in the state.

“Our goal is that every student has project-based learning and the Fab Lab is the tool that we’re using to do that,” Woolridge said.