The month of May is just about over and that means we have selected another recipient of our monthly $500 EdTech grant. This month’s awardee is Renee Wells, a STEAM teacher at Zephyr Lane Elementary School in Bakersfield, California! Renee and her students have a very intriguing project planned and one that should definitely inspire everyone within their school community. Renee will be working with her students to use 3D printing to help fill a very important need—the creation of prosthetic hands for children who are in need of assistance. We’re excited to be able to help contribute to their character education unit and congratulate Renee and her students on being selected as this month’s recipients!

In their character education unit, Renee will be teaching her students about people who use prosthetics. To extend the learning process when it comes to this topic, Renee will also be having her students research the prosthetic development process, the nervous system, and the structure of muscles and bones. Using what they learn during this research, they will then leverage a 3D printer to design usable prototypes on the computer that can be printed and serve as prosthetic hands or lower legs! It should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway—this is a tremendously innovative initiative and one that truly captures the spirit of the Maker Movement by bringing people together to fill a community need!

To us, the most impressive part of this whole project might be that Renee’s students are only 10 and 11 years old! That’s an amazing responsibility for students of that age and a fantastic way to start learning about what it means to be real-world problem solvers. Renee has 124 total students who will be participating in this project in various capacities and she is also planning on collaborating with Enabling the Future, which is a global network of volunteers, including teachers, students, medical professionals, tinkerers, and all kinds of makers who just want to make a difference.

In order to become active contributors to these efforts, Renee and her students need more 3D printers to use, which is what led her to apply for our grant. She will be receiving some FlashForge 3D printers from us as well as some of the filament she needs to make her project possible. Since a lot of her students qualify for free or reduced school lunch and understand the concept of need, she wants them to feel what it’s like to be the ones who are able to provide something for somebody else who may be in even greater need than they are. Through this project, she hopes that her students can make an impact on someone somewhere and capture that spirit to ultimately contribute more to global need in the future.

Ultimately, Renee and her students are going to need a lot of filament to print as much as they hope to, but it’s important to her that they at least get started. Her students will be using the 3D printers and filaments to print out the components needed to construct prosthetic hands that will ultimately be used by child recipients. As they work together to assemble the 3D printed hands, her students will have the chance to work together and brainstorm creative ways to make their designs as efficient as possible.

For Renee, the ultimate goal of this project has two main components. The first of them is to empower her students—who often are unable to enjoy luxuries—with the opportunity to be a part of something that’s life-changing for somebody else. As they design, print, and assemble a prosthetic hand for a child who has greater needs than they do, Renee also wants her students to realize that they are taking part in learning that’s deeper than their ordinary educational experiences. She wants to get them constructing, revising, designing, and applying their new knowledge to real-world problem solving, which is exactly what technology helps them accomplish.

We’re very excited to be able to help Renee and her students with this project and can’t wait to see how it turns out! To keep up with any updates, you can follow Renee on Twitter here. If you are interested in applying for our grant award for the month of June, the application is now open and will remain open until June 20. To learn more about the program and to apply, click here! And, make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram to ensure you never miss any of our updates.