2. Sustainability

Creating a mold

Create the mold:

I made a mold using the onshape program. This allows me to make 15cm x 20cm panels of biomaterial that are 4mm thick. After hardening, I can further process these panels with the laser cutter. I also had the idea of ​​mixing my base materials with other ingredients, such as dog hair. It results in a composite material that has greater strength.

Reflection

Have you considered sustainable practices in your teaching in the pasts? How? What aspects do you think should be improved in your own teaching environment?

Our school is a member of the “School of the Future” network, which focuses on the UN’s sustainability goals. In this respect, sustainability has been an issue at our school for a long time. I always try to take aspects of sustainability into account in my lessons. On the one hand, this can be achieved by addressing sustainability aspects in all topics in class. On the other hand, it is possible for me to be a role model for the students, for example by ensuring that materials are handled carefully in technology lessons, that there is not too much waste and that attempts are made to reuse materials.

How Digital Fabrication might support sustainable practices? When using Digital Fabrication what actions you can take to support sustainable practices.

You can address sustainability when selecting the material. You can consider whether there are more sustainable substitutes and what advantages or disadvantages are associated with them. One aspect of the projects that the students create should be the issue of sustainability. For electrically powered objects, one could consider how the energy requirement can be minimized and whether, for example, rechargeable batteries or solar cells can be used instead of batteries. In this respect, sustainability aspects play a very important role in digital fabrication, and questions of sustainability are automatically always addressed here.

Do you think your school is ready to a change in mindset? Why? How can you get support from other stakeholders? How would you structure a training for teachers?

As already mentioned, sustainability plays a major role in our school through our network work. By exchanging ideas with other schools, we can develop further ideas and improve. At our school, most teachers no longer need to be convinced that sustainability plays an important role. It’s different with our students: some of them still need to be convinced that sustainability is important in all areas of life. But only some of our students are really convinced of this. We discovered this, for example, when we organized a repair cafe to try to get students to drop off defective devices and try to repair them together. Many students commented that it would be better to throw away defective devices instead of repairing them. This made us think a lot and we are now trying even harder at school to set a good role model and to sensitize our students to this question.