May 2005 - Smart Kids, You, and We

By Anthony J. Lockwood

I  had dinner with Geoff Glidden and Anthony Borzillo my first night during National Manufacturing Week. It was the highlight of my show.

You don’t know these guys. Yet. I have no doubt some day you will. Geoff and Tony were the winners in the high-school team category of the “Extreme Redesign: The 3D Printing Challenge” contest sponsored by the Dimension 3D Printing Group unit of Stratasys. We met at the awards banquet. Scott Crump, Stratasys’s grand pooh-bah and the inventor of FDM (fused deposition modeling), joined us along with Geoff and Tony’s families.

Geoff and Tony‘s winning design was called the “Mouse Radio.” Basically, imagine having all your tuner controls on a mouse. This gives you ready access to the dials as you surf, say, GlobalSpec for the right part. Thus, you do not interrupt your work to change the station. I asked my gamer experts—my teen-aged daughter and her boyfriend—what they thought about Mouse Radio; they said, “Dude.” From kids who build Tesla Coils and Jacob’s Ladders out of junk parts for amusement, this is high praise indeed.

Also at the awards ceremony was Andy Dahnke, winner of the high-school individual category, and Mark Paul Kujawski, the post-secondary school winner. Andy came up with a lighted retractable leash because he had grown tired of stumbling around in the dark with his mutt. Mark Paul, who attends Central Michigan University, devised an amazingly cool stair-climbing robot.

All of these guys were awarded some college scholarship money, as were the second and third place winners. And all of this stuff was inspired to come out of their heads because Dimension 3D put its money where its mouth is and challenged them to win some college scholarship money. Plus, it charged them up to continue their engineering education.

I tip my hat to the folks at Dimension 3D for putting in all the effort to make this contest happen. Check out dimensionprinting.com/extreme_win.html (hot-linked in digital versions of this article) for pictures and details of the winning entries.

Talking with Geoff and Tony and the other kids about their inventions was just what the old ticker needed. All the winners are way smarter than me. And all represent brighter days ahead for design and manufacturing.

Now, many of you work for outfits that support your local schools or that run contests or whatever to inspire and help along tomorrow’s engineers. Keep it up and step it up.
With that in mind, Desktop Engineering wants to help get the word out about what you’re doing. Starting now, we have a new link off our home page called “Future Engineers.” Here, we’ll list your contests, links to your scholarship information, organizations for emerging engineers, and whatnot. It has a link so that you can send us your information.

We’re all in this together, so let’s join together to help tomorrow’s engineers.

Thanks, Pal.—Lockwood

Lockwood