AURORA |With a few key strokes and the help of some cutting-edge machinery, there is little students at Cherokee Trail High School can’t make.
The school’s fabrication laboratory — known as the “fab lab” — is home to a 3-D printer, precision milling machine, laser engraver and other computer-aided manufacturing devices.
It makes a traditional wood shop look like a place where cave art was created.
“If they say, ‘I want to make this,’ we now have the tool set where they can make almost everything,” said Ben Nuebel, a pre-engineering and technology teacher at CTHS.
Early this school year, Cherokee Trail’s lab was named part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s International Fab Lab Network, an exclusive group of fewer than 500 labs around the world that boast the sort of high-tech equipment that allow people to make just about anything.
The lab is the only one in Colorado to earn the honor, and one of just 59 in the country. Worldwide, there are 416 labs in the MIT network.
Paul Clinton, a pre-engineering and technology teacher, said the prestigious honor is an important step for the lab.
“It kind of justifies what we do, and how important it is,” he said.
Since the school opened more than a decade ago, the fab lab has always been more high-tech than a traditional wood shop. But thanks to some additional science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) funding provided through a voter-approved bond measure last year, the school was able to add several pieces of equipment to qualify for MIT’s network.
The designation was important after the support from voters in the Cherry Creek School District.
“It shows the citizens and the voters what we did with the STEM money from the bond election,” Clinton said.
The lab is already becoming a place where students aren’t just learning how to use the equipment, but they now have enough expertise to actually start making and selling products.
Collin Reimer, a junior at the school, has been using the laser cutter to build a bench for tying fly-fishing lures, and selling them online.
Reimer said he probably could have made a similar bench without the equipment, but it wouldn’t have been as nice.
“I would have had to dumb it down quite a bit,” he said.
For the teachers, that sort of real-world application is what they’ve always hoped the lab would produce.
On a recent morning, students in a manufacturing class watched as one of the mills methodically carved the school’s “CT” logo from a slab of plywood. Nuebel said making those logos would have been possible in a traditional wood shop, but it would have required a variety of tools, and each piece would have come out looking different from the rest. In the fab lab, students designed the piece on a computer, and watched as the mill made precise cuts to dozens of matching pieces.
That experience is crucial, Clinton and Nuebel said, because when students enter the work force, these sorts of computer-based design and construction methods will be required of them.
“We are giving kids more real-life skills, industry-level skills,” Clinton said.