Will it become easier to get into college in the years ahead?

The number of high school graduates is projected to peak in 2025- then there’s a demographic cliff due to birth rates that have declined since 2007.

It may relieve some of the demand- fewer kids chasing the same # of seats

I printed the models at home using my Bambu Printer, then brought them back to school the next day.

I volunteered a few times in the classroom- it was so fun to see the whole process
✏️ writing
🖥️ modeling
🖨️ printing
🎨 painting
📜 and finally, exhibiting with their essays in a full gallery hallway show.

With TinkerCad, it was really easy - almost all students got SOMETHING on the canvas. Many of them got deeply invested in their models.

Some imported models of other objects and animals, while others created their own out of basic shapes from scratch.

Many ancient and modern rulers have made monuments to reflect their legacy.

My son's teacher asked her students: if you could build a monument to YOUR legacy, what would it look like?

How is 3D printing being used in schools? Sure, some schools have a STEM lab, but I want to share a story of how my child's social studies teacher incorporated 3D modeling & printing into her class.

Students designed, modeled, printed and painted "monuments" to their own legacy.

Famously, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were early phone phreaks, and their early blue box experiments led directly to the formation of Apple.

But by that time the era of phone phreaking was almost coming to a close...

People with a lot of time on their hands experimented with a strange mix of social engineering and technology hacking to make connections to places they weren't supposed to.

My favorite was Joe Engressia - as a blind child with endless he learned to whistle the exact tones that the switchers made!

Eventually, AT&T did come up with magnificent switching equipment - which if you squint looks an awful lot like a modern datacenter. These allowed customers to make their own calls!

But this had an issue ...

"Do things that don't scale".

We think of phones as automated today, but back in the 40s they required legions of mostly women operators to connect calls. Like many startups today, they needed to build with people first and then only automated it over time.

The early telephone network has explosive growth. The early automated switches, "step by steps" were clunky and manual but allowed for it to begin to scale.