Blanca Duarte’s final project at the Barcelona Fab Lab was an impressive wrist-worn Braille teaching device.
The third year of the Fab Academy wrapped up last week, with the 70 odd students giving their final project presentations at 13 Fab Labs scattered around the world. The Fab Academy is a distributed education platform built on top of the Fab Lab network; at the core is a curriculum of weekly projects and a video lecture every Wednesday. The class is based on Neil Gershenfeld’s How to Make (Almost) Anything class at MIT, and Dr. Gershenfeld convenes most of the Wednesday lectures.
All of the videos for the class are available on the Fab Academy's Vimeo page. All of the students document their projects in a big Mercurial repository.
On a related note, the class How To Make Something That Makes (Almost) Anything (on making rapid prototyping machines) also just wrapped up. All the projects are pretty well documented at the class page, and range from hardware like James Coleman’s 5-axis MTM Snap mod to Matt Keeter’s Functional 3D Representation solver and editor. Lots of good resources there.
Matt Keeter added a 5th axis to Jonathan Ward’s MTM Snap.
