FabEdu: digital fabrication in youth work

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