MAKERS

We teach students to build things.

Every upper school student takes makers. It is not an elective and it is not a break from the academic day. A sixth grader arrives able to make things. Over three years, they learn to make things that have to work, on a deadline, for someone other than themselves.

What's in the room

We rebuilt the makers space this year. It now holds a laser cutter, 3D printers, and a working screenprinting lab, alongside the printmaking, engraving, and sculpture work students have always done here.

That is unusual equipment for a K–8 school. We put it in because a thirteen-year-old who can design a part, cut it, and hold it an hour later understands something about the distance between an idea and an object that cannot be taught any other way.

Screenprinting, with a real client

Screenprinting is unforgiving in a way adolescents find genuinely interesting. The screen has to be coated and exposed correctly. Registration has to line up within a fraction of an inch or the image is ruined. Ink has to be pulled with even pressure, in one pass, at the right angle. Your first several prints fail. Then one works.

Upper school students print the school's shirts and swag. What used to come from an outside vendor is now designed and pulled by students in this building, which means a real quantity and a real date. Eighty shirts due Friday teaches things a graded assignment cannot.

About the screens in this room

We are careful about technology at The Academy, and a room with laser cutters and 3D printers might look like the exception. It isn't. Designing a part in CAD and holding it twenty minutes later is precisely what we mean when we say technology should have a reason. The software is not the destination. It is how you get the object.

Why this sits alongside Latin

Everything else in the upper school asks a student to be precise on paper. Makers asks for the same precision somewhere a mistake is visible, physical, and immediate. A misregistered print is a wrong answer you can hold in your hand.

The habits are identical. Work carefully, look at what you actually produced rather than what you meant to produce, and go again.