21st Century Shop Class @ Otherlab’s MENTOR.

The 21st century will be filled with opportunities and challenges.  To seize those opportunities and meet those challenges, we need a new generation of problem solvers who are enabled with the best skills for design, prototyping, and manufacturing.  These problem solvers will need to be well versed in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fundamentals, with a depth of creativity enriched through knowledge of history and the humanities.

Shop classes are disappearing just when our country needs them the most. We feel that shop class has the potential to be the most relevant class in school. If we establish shop class as a place where you can design and make anything you imagine, we can resurrect this vital resource and make it part of every class in high school. Like the school library, shop class can enrich the curriculum of technical classes by enabling the construction of moving machines and models, just as it enriches art class through empowering people to create sculpture or architectural models.