Making good: SKIPPERVILLE, ALABAMA - LONG ELEMENTARY SCHOOL COMPUTER LAB RENOVATION

摘要

Many American schools in poorer communities need textbooks and ball fields and higher teacher salaries. They also need something Popular Mechanics can help provide: furniture. The desks and tables and shelves that are the infrastructure of everyday learning. We partnered with DonorsChoose.org, a remarkable organization that helps teachers crowdfund projects in their own classrooms, to find teachers in need. We then connected the teachers - one at an elementary school in rural Alabama, one at a high school near Detroit - with makers whose skills matched the projects. The results were inspiring. Twenty-four craftspeople (from TechShop, the national makerspace chain, and Foomatic Makerspace in Montgomery, Alabama) volunteered to build exactly what the students needed. One man drove 850 miles to deliver custom-milled furniture parts and then spent two days assembling them. We were humbled. The teachers were grateful. The kids? They were psyched.