Similar experience here. Learning to solder was one of the more valuable skills I picked up in a class, mostly because of its broad applicability: fixing xboxes, keyboards, etc.

I don’t think this “fab lab” has similar applicability although, if I’m being honest, I’d love to toy with the machinery, etc.

David Foster:

I’m reminded of some of the purported benefits of teaching kids to do math via an abacus.

As the era of mechanical analog computers drew to an end, several researchers (including Vannevar Bush, IIRC) commented that these devices helped people develop an intuitive understanding of differential equations in a way that other approaches did not. There is now a group at Marshall University which is acting on this insight by creating new mechanical differential analyzers for use as teaching tools.

It’s on my list of things to write about, hopefully in the not-to-distant future.

Admittedly sometimes higher-budget toys are really a serious improvement — e.g., an oscilloscope would have been quite expensive back at the time of that OMSI class, but would have been helpful to peek into what was going on in a nontrivial circuit. But even in that hypothetical it might be equally helpful just to back off to a pure mechanical device or a trivial electric circuit (like the classic prototype telegraph that I vaguely remember from some Boy-Scout-level books of the time) so that most of its operation can be inspected and fiddled with and understood directly, without instruments.

Specialized not-terribly-expensive not nontrivial teaching/demo tools can sometimes be very good. I wasn’t that impressed at the time by the ripple tank experiments and demos we did in high school — the high school course unfortunately didn’t do a good job of conveying how much waves infest the world of tractable practical physics. (Perhaps that’s unavoidable in a pre-calculus physics course, since it’s hard to analyze meaningful wave problems without calculus.) But in retrospect a few years later, working in post-calculus course with fellow students who had 800 math SATs but not necessarily any physical intuition for wave phenomena, I appreciated them quite a lot. (It was rather helpful having a tangible mental model for stuff like interference.)

On the other hand, I suspect that adding the “sizzle” of computerization is very helpful, both in getting student interest and in selling the program to various funding agencies.

It’s nice to let them see how it’s (mostly) done in the real world, but they don’t learn the principles of mechanical design from seeing a CNC machine make their piece for them.

What utter idiocy. What an insane fantasy. Nobody who can’t invent without a “fab lab” can possibly invent anything with one. Indeed, you learn to invent by making do with whatever crap you’ve got. These kids need vocational training, not some TED talker clown masturbating his funding away trying to turn kids with 90 IQs into Thomas Edison.

This is the thinking of somebody who has never invented or created anything, and all he knows about it, he learned from Hollywood. Big shiny lab! That’s how you do it!

That is why the Statist school will always fail for many.