Laser Cutter for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Projects
My students need a Full Spectrum Laser Cutter to design their renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.
$13,971 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
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Our Maker Shop is constantly filled with excited students ready to create and make, from first bell through lunch, to long after school gets out. The spark of invention burns most brightly when their ideas can take physical form quickly. I am constantly astonished by what these young engineers, given access to a space with precise tools, can envision and create.
Our hundreds of eager Makers form an incredible mix of backgrounds, with about 60% Latino and about the same from socioeconomically disadvantaged families.
Being in the middle of Marin county, there is a middle-class and affluent population as well, making for a truly diverse student body. Our young engineers bring a set of energy curiosities and concerns as diverse as their backgrounds, from worrying about their family's energy bill to wanting to know how the solar panels on their roof works. Students in the Shop Technology, Exploring Technology, and Maker Club programs are given the opportunity to build and create to address real-world problems, it makes their schoolwork relevant, real, and not really feel at all like work.
My Project
This grant would fund a laser cutter for the 250 students in Engineering Technology classes and the Maker Club and transform our Maker Shop into a renewable energy lab! This year, engineering students will be challenged with a variety of energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, from designing better wind powered-turbines to creating energy-efficient model homes. After students design and build a prototype, they will test their designs and improve their designs to get better results.
A laser cutter cuts at the speed of a middle school student's patience, allowing them to quickly and easily make improvements to their designs while they are still excited about their ideas.
Instead of having to wait many days before they can try out their next idea, laser cutters reduce that wait to a matter of minutes, allowing them to iterate their design multiple times in a single session, building the enthusiasm.
Challenging middle students to design solutions to real-world issues makes the school relevant and important. Our goal is to have students learn about and tackle engineering solutions to renewable energy and energy efficiency issues. The laser cutter, an incredible and proven maker tool, allows students to precisely design parts using CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and then precision-cut those parts. This laser cutter will allow any student, regardless of prior knowledge or skill, to take an idea for improving our world, design, build, test, and improve it, all while they still are excited!
More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Singer and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
