[MUSIC] Welcome to our chat today with Ron Duncan, who's a leader in the field for the Illinois Marketplace and Maker Literacy Project. Thank you, Ron, for spending your time with us. >> Always a pleasure to be with you, Vishal, thank you so much. >> So first of all, tell us about yourself and what your mission is with this project. >> We started this project about a year and a half ago, through an effort of the University of Illinois Extension Services in something called the Extension Initiative. That was a grant project that was funded by the Office of Engagement as well as Extension that provided funding for outreach projects and projects that were deemed worthy of exploring the opportunity for the university extension to also work within the university. And extend its reach inward to involve other schools, other colleges, other areas of expertise within the college as a whole. We're very, very fortunate to have met Professor Madhu and with previous endeavors through our poverty simulation work, and with your help, with Eric's help, and with Madhu's help, we were able to craft a very successful grant application. That grant application netted us the funding to be able to move forward with this project. We labeled it the Illinois Marketplace Maker Literacy Program. And that basically embodies the idea of taking both marketplace literacy, as well as maker literacy, into regions in Northern Illinois, specifically in those low-resource, low-literacy areas that may be In the west side or the south side of Chicagoland area. As well as into deep Southern Illinois where we basically have a lot of rural poverty, and again, low-resource individuals that are available to us there that are really looking for an opportunity to improve their life, improve their chances, improve their outlook to life. So that's kind of what brought us to the table and got the program going. >> I want to get some sort of stories from you from the field. And perhaps you can share something starting with let's say, the younger kids and then move onto one of more of the other audiences you serve. >> We have found a great deal of resonance with this program among the youth of our region. We've also seen many of our young adults, especially those in certain training areas or, as we'll discuss farther in a minute, a Job Corps opportunity there. A real hunger for this type of opportunity to find ways to not only have a career and get a job, but also perhaps make a job. Then some of our older adults, if you will, or middle-aged adults, as I like to say now- >> [LAUGH] >> That I'm already there. How they can use their experiential knowledge to actually be the creator, to be the maker of things that solve their problems. And then may also solve other people's problems, and again, gives them that kind of that pathway into the micro entrepreneurialism, if you will. A couple things come to mind specifically. One very early program that we did was with the middle school at Carroll, Illinois. Here we were able to go into a sixth grade class. This again is a class of young men and women, a racially mixed class, with lots of different backgrounds. A lot of different socioeconomic trends there as well. And be able to bring a resource to them that they had never seen before. They had heard about 3D printers. They may have seen something on television, but actually being able to bring one into class, start it up and them watch it do something was just astounding. Of course, there's always the cool factor, wow this is really neat, this is really cool. But then we, of course, through the working that we're doing we try to take that enthusiasm and package that up a little bit and say, well now what could you do with this? What would this do for you? What could you create in this that would do something for someone else? And we just see an explosion of creativity and ideas. And we're very fortunate to have a good program that allows us to kind of harness that and make that into a final stage opportunity for them where they can have an actual product they can hold in their hand. And we find that that's very, very important. Within this demographic, within this audience sense that we do most of our work in. This idea of concretizing the outcomes of products are very, very important. These are folks that either because of various societal pressures, lack of education, socioeconomic issues, really are inhibited in many, many ways. And I think, as you're well aware, some of the research that Madhu has done points to this, and others as well. That their ability to think in the abstract is greatly restrained because of these stresses that they face in their everyday lives. And so they become very, very concrete in their thinking and their applications. So one of the things we're seeing is this ability of the 3D printer to actually bring that concrete capacity to life. So that even the most nascent idea that they may have can actually be visualized. They can pick it up and hold it, and look at it. >> Nice. >> And once that happens, it's very, very easy for them to say, that needs to be bigger. That needs to be smaller. I need to do this or I need to do that. To where, if we were trying to work with just an abstract drawing, a rendering, or even a business plan, something as abstract as a business plan, we would not have anywhere the success we've had in terms of trying to build this acumen into people. We see that this specifically in our setting with our Job Corps. These are young men and women who are in the Job Corps to learn a tactical skill, I mean a tactile skill. They want to lay brick, they want to build things, they want to be in urban forestry. Perhaps have not have been as successful as they could have been in traditional school settings, so they're here to do this. And now this ability to be the creator, to be the maker, if you will. And put that to work in a concrete way, it's just phenomenal. We've seen great success in their ability to create very meaningful projects, things that solve problems they're having now. Things that could solve problems for other people. >> Share some specific examples of products or maybe solutions that they might have made. >> One I would point to is we'll just call him Bob. Bob was again in our marketplace literacy program, went through the entire program with us. And his circumstances were the fact that he'd been battling a disease that had basically bankrupted him. There's a whole backstory to that. But the problem was that his resource level was low. And he was looking for opportunities, and what have you. And it just so happened that he is a very avid gardener and an organic farmer who was having a great deal of problems with some very, very expensive seed. Now remember low resources, expensive seeds. His thinking was that the planting device that he was using to try to plant some of these heirloom, organic products, very expensive, $100 an ounce for the seed, wasn't performing effectively with this hand planter he had. So he was able to create a specific planter plate. Which is sort of the device that grabs the seed and transports it to the ground, to fit this particular heirloom variety of product he was working with. >> I see, okay. >> So he was able to initially solve his problem. And not only that, but it didn't take him long to realize this was a problem that probably more people were having. So he's actually looking now at an opportunity to expand that variety of plate for this particular planter to other heirloom and other difficult seeds to plant variety. And if he's successful in moving that forward it will be, first of all, a boon to organic farmers and others who are using this type of planter. And also it'll be a financial boon for him as well to actually use his problem in solving it to solve other people's problems. I also have an example of a young man who came into one of our classes. Went through our Introduction to 3D Printing. He was right at the age of the break over age that we like to see, about 12 to 13 years old. A very competent young man, came in and just loved the idea of being able to sit down at a computer terminal, create a design on his own, and then have that in his hand when he left. Late last year bugged his parents, all through the Christmas season, begged them for a 3D printer. And they very wisely said, you're going to need to have some skin in the game on this one. So we'll buy you a kit. And then he came back to the lab and was begging, of course, Jim McEwan from ITG3D and me. Can you help me kind of get this together? I think I can put it together. Would you help me? And now we see him and his fully assembled printer. And now he's off to the races because he was printing Star Wars things and had a little figurine of Yoda. All kinds of great things. So he's got the handle on it. He's got it now to where he's figured out that if I see it, if I can think of it, I can make it, I can create it. And so we're thrilled about those outcomes that we're seeing. >> In your case, you also started to assemble your own printers in the lab? >> Yes. >> So would you say that somebody who's starting out in a small town in India or Africa. And somehow they can get hold of perhaps not even a kit, but they can get hold of the designs and then potentially some place to cut up the wood frame, or procure some of the basic components. Is this a viable technology for that kind of audience as well? >> I would say yes, very much so. There was a need where because of some product level changes that university was planning to do that we were anticipating having sort of a shortage of printers to use for a period of time. This got myself and again, our co-partner there in the lab, ITG3D, Jim McEwen and some of his folks thinking about well, how can we fix or alleviate the possibility of having classes scheduled and not necessarily having all the printer resources we might want. And we came up with the idea, well, the easiest thing to do there is just build some printers. So we put together a very interesting design that we thought would meet not only our immediate needs, but longer term needs, made it versatile. One of the most important things is that, again, we prototyped about 40% of the parts on our 3D printers before we actually put them in to build our alumium form. The new printers will have dual extruders, which was a function that we were unfamiliar with. We've never used anything like that. But we were able to prototype those parts and assemble those in test phases. And modify our designs based on what we could do with a 3D printer. We did that literally in the shop with those tools that we had. And now we're about 90% complete. We're getting ready, probably next week, to go into our testing phase with them, and so we should have a completely built Delta model 3D printer from parts, assembled completely from disparate parts. Based on just the acumen we were able to learn from using the printers. Knowing what we wanted to see different from the current models that we had. And also adding to our capacity to do a little bit larger frame printed even more. So yeah, it was a great teach the lesson but by the way learn the lesson. And see if you can put that into place and make it work for you. And so far, hopefully with luck, we'll have some very, very functional printers in about two weeks. >> Nice, well, I think that's a pretty good message that even in a low-resource situation this technology which seems high tech or very expensive you can sort of build your own, sort of with parts that are cost effective. And of course, you need the labor and the experimentation, but it's possible. Yeah, thank you for that message and thank you for sharing your expertise with us. >> Real pleasure, thank you Vishal. >> Thank you. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
